I don’t know what the “new feature” bit is about; I’ve been using off-line dictation on iOS for years. Anytime I need to dictate something very long, I turn the phone on airplane mode so that I can dictate without Apple, inevitably deciding, at some point in the middle of my dictation, to delete my entire message and begin to retype it in slow motion (has anybody else experienced this? I’ve been dealing with this for at least five years, since an early version of their online dictation).

Unfortunately, airplane mode is the only way to enable off-line dictation. Or, is there another way?

The first version of dictation had no online mode at all; when Apple added that, presumably as a Slowloris attack on the entire world, it ruined the entire experience.