What is voice dictation compared with other speech products? Captions describe what was said for viewers. Meeting transcription stores a record of a conversation, often with timestamps. Voice assistants answer questions or run commands. Dictation sits in the writing loop: email, documents, chat, code comments, and notes. A good dictation tool therefore cares about the focused app, punctuation, filler words, and custom names, not only about producing a file you could email to yourself after the fact.
Typical sessions are short. You hold or tap a hotkey, speak a thought, and release so the recognizer can finalize. Some people toggle a longer session for a paragraph. Push-to-talk versus toggle is a control choice, not a different kind of recognition. After the words appear, you may still edit, but the goal is that the first draft is close enough that speaking was faster than typing. Offline engines keep that loop working on a plane; cloud engines trade a network round trip for less local hardware load.