They can still send the information they collected from your microphone later, when you connect to the internet ...

You want an open source solution, not just an offline solution.

Even so, offline AI solutions have been piss poor and Google moving the state of the art in spite of their vested interest in keeping people online is a good thing.

Yes, we want an open source solution, but I'm not going to work on it. So who's going to work on it? Are you?

In absence of resources working towards the ideal, I'll applaud any step in the right direction.

To be fair there are others that have been pushing the needle in this space for considerable time. The standout for me is https://snips.ai Offline, multiple platforms, multiple languages, many parts open source and more oss parts in the pipeline. While certainly not currently aimed at dictation, but instead assistant building and automation. In this space on device speed, privacy & offline are critical. In the case of Snips "piss poor" falls short from the reality of what I have experienced YMMV.

Nonetheless we all benefit from this progress

I hope they add this to the Web Speech API in Chrome. It doesn't have punctuation right now and that's a killer for me.