The fact that they are online is stopping a bunch of people from shouting at nobody in particular to "dim the lights", "play this (local) playlist", "turn ac on", "play two random episodes of paw patrol"... Eg. me.

Many of those who are concerned with apps phoning home would be the ones to keep their data and media locally too!

Very practical, there are even dictation apps with quite good accuracy (and that is dictation, which is much harder because the sentences are free-form, not predefined) which work offline (like some offline Nuance Dragon apps).