Speech feedback window will not close

Question

Level 2

260 points

Speech feedback window will not close

I made the mistake of impatiently hitting the escape key (or function key or whatever) often enough to pop up the little round speech feedback window. I cannot for the life of me get the window to close now.

According to Apple's support page

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10705?viewlocale=en_US

if I "Turn off Speakable Items in Accessibility preferences", the window should close. It does not.

I tried making sure that Speakable Items was shut off, and then rebooted my computer. The pesky window appeared again.

Anyone have a clue how to get rid of the little monster? Minimizing it to the dock doesn't count---I want it closed.

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2009), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Dec 7, 2012 7:44 AM

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Answer 1

Bill Rising Author

Level 2

260 points

Dec 7, 2012 8:17 AM in response to Bill Rising

OK, I tried all the following, to no avail:

I opened the Activity Monitor, and quit

Speech Recognition Server

Speech Feedback Server

and then rebooted. The pesky speech feedback window opened.

I then moved

com.apple.speech.recognition.AppleSpeechRecognition.prefs.plist

com.apple.speech.recognition.feedback.prefs.plist

com.apple.speech.recognition.recognizer.prefs.plist

to another folder, opened the Activity Monitory, and quit

Speech Recognition Server

Speech Feedback Server

and force-quit

com.apple.speech.synthesis.activityd

I then went to the Accessibility prefpane and turned off 'Enable access for assistive devices'

and rebooted.

All to no avail. The speech feedback window opened up again. Oddly enough, the icons on my desktop decided they should move themselves to new locations, though I didn't touch any of the prefpanes for the Finder.

What, oh what do I have to do to get rid of this annoying little floating window (and not have its servers hogging RAM)?

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Answer 2

Eric Root

Level 10

685,275 points

Dec 7, 2012 10:29 AM in response to Bill Rising

Maybe this will help:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1915390?answerId=9039934022#9039934022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/641439

If you monitor the "More Like This" box, other solved threads appear. Opening them usually displays other threads.

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Answer 3

Bill Rising Author

Level 2

260 points

Dec 7, 2012 3:00 PM in response to Eric Root

I had seen both of these before posting---one had a special speech command that fixed things, the other had hardware problems (kernel panics). Thanks, though.

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Answer 4

Eric Root

Level 10

685,275 points

Dec 7, 2012 5:22 PM in response to Bill Rising

You are welcome. Sorry it didn't help.

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Answer 5

Bill Rising Author

Level 2

260 points

Dec 10, 2012 3:54 PM in response to Bill Rising

For what it is worth, the window stopped popping up on its own, through some mysterious process.

All I did after my second set of tests was to quit the

Speech Recognition Server

Speech Feedback Server

again, and then forget about the problem.

Today, I've been fighting with the migration assistant (for a change of pace), and I noticed that despite several logout-login cycles, I've not seen the window pop up.

So the problem might be solved, but the solution remains unknown.

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Answer 6

Bill Rising Author

Level 2

260 points

Jan 13, 2013 8:00 AM in response to Bill Rising

For what it is worth, I noticed today that switching input methods from US keyboard to Spell Catcher (10.4.1) was causing the Speech Feedback window to open. Clicking on Input Menu > Use Speech Commands closed the window. [The Input Menu is the menu which Spell Catcher shows in the menubar; it also appears if there are multiple lanuages/keyboards set up in the Input Sources tab of the Language & Text preference pane.]

This appears to solve the problem I was having.

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