Milo. Thanks. It took me a couple days of trying things and waiting for answers to tech questions to companies but none replaces the Voice to Text engine in android. Even Dragon dictates into its own notepad and then you would copy and paste that into your texting program. SpeechTexter does similar but also says that it uses the google engine for what it does. Well what good is that? That's probably why all these apps say they need network connection permission to operate.
Even if I could get the google engine to only work in offline mode only and not interact with google servers that would be acceptable but I don't see how to do that. Not that I'm doing anything secret just that I think it's a good idea to get google out of the loop in as many ways as possible, while, yes, still being on an android, even google, phone. Is there no way to do that?