I've been testing Android's dictation stuff while speaking quietly and it works better than I expected. (That is, the mistakes it makes seem to be the same if I were to talk louder; some common repeating misunderstandings, some things where it's thrown off by my accent.) Having the mic close by makes recording a quiet voice much more tractable than hearing it in conversation, we humans tend to stand further apart and mics are better than ears by now.

Not that I'd be advocating this for library study halls!