Google doesn't do voice to text on the phone, they use an online service. It would take a ginormous corpus of trained data and cpu to quickly process most of th

Google doesn't do voice to text on the phone, they use an online service. It would take a ginormous corpus of trained data and cpu to quickly process most of the ways people pronounce even one language. Their conversational translation is voice based because typing back and forth on the phone takes too long. It works wonderfully when there is internet, but you're screwed if you're traveling without a data plan. Then you're forced to "learn a language" or "use hand signals" or "write things down" like some 20th century chump.