[jdtang13]

If you want to enable Apple's much-better offline dictation, you can press-hold on the microphone icon, then select "English (US)" or even any other language.

Apple's online, presumably neural network based speech transcription service is horrible. It is an absolute disaster. Slow, unresponsive, drops syllables randomly, and provides no good feedback to the user. It is hard to believe that it was designed by someone who actually intended this product to be consumed by real users. It fails even basic comparisons against the predecessor that it was intended to replace.