Thank you for your response.
Perhaps I haven’t explained it very well:-
The MIT Speech recognition works perfectly, all it does is call the device’s speech recognition service. I only asked on here in the hope someone had a similar experience and could help.
My MIT app controls motors that operate a tilt and pan mechanism that I made, which sits between the tripod head and the camera.
My camera can run an app that allows it to be remote controlled by a mobile app BUT it requires a Direct Wifi connection so disconnects from the router, meaning I have no internet access while that is active.
I run the 2 apps together in split screen mode.
The now default Android Google Gboard keyboard app can accept speech input and by default uses the Google online service. It also has the ability to work offline, if this is selected you choose your language(s) and it downloads the dictionaries to your device and will work without an internet connection. The offline option, even though selected, doesn’t work on my Android 8 Huawei tablet, it just states Network Unavailable so it seems to be trying to use the online service still. I am unsure whether the problem is with the Android version, the Gboard input or the Huawei tablet. I have contacted Google and Huawei, but I’m not holding my breath.
Many thanks for your time
UPDATE - I got my emergency mobile from the car, a Motororla Moto G5, and it has Android 8 with Gboard as the default input device and all set up to work offline. I tried voice speech with WiFi on and it works fine, turned WiFi off and it doesn’t work so it looks as though it’s the Android version rather than the device.