GBoard app: Initializing of voice-to-text takes forever

I use GBoard on my Poco X3 and the keyboard sporadically takes forever to initialize when using Voice Typing. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it isnt. Sometimes it shows "initializing" and than aborts - sometimes it goes over into speech-recognition mode. Very unreliable :( Not sure why... Occurs on Wifi, as well as on mobile data connection. Havent found a way to reproduce it reliably. Any ideas why? Latest updates installed. Cache already cleared. Different things tried, nothing yet worked :( Thanks!