corespeechd is sending a massive amount to data to Internet. Why?

I can confirm the fix for me

1. System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Siri

2. Click “Open Siri Preferences...”

3. Check the box for “Enable Ask Siri”

4. Move the radio button for “Voice Feedback” to “Off”

5. Uncheck “Enable Ask Siri”

No more packets sent, network graph is flat lined.

Use your voice to enter text on your Mac - Apple Support

"Without Enhanced Dictation, your spoken words and certain other data are sent to Apple to be converted into text and help your Mac understand what you mean. As a result, your Mac must be connected to the Internet, your words might not convert to text as quickly, and you can speak for no more than 40 seconds at a time (30 seconds in OS X Yosemite or earlier)."

I seem to have exactly the same issue. Mac Mini 2018, macOS Mojave 10.14.1 (factory).

I use the machine as a home media server with some daily cron tasks. Current uptime is 2d15h from which corespeechd used 9h32m of CPU time (second most hungry process is docker with 1h51m) and sent 20GB+ out somewhere to the internet. I have checked that Siri is disabled and I'm not aware of anything which should be using corespeechd services.

I was observing processes for a while and it looks like corespeechd is spiking CPU in bursts every 30s, for a few seconds (like 10s in my case).

This must be a bug or some kind of misbehavior.

Yes, I have this exact same problem. Brand new 2018 Mac Mini, Corei5, used for audio streaming (AssetUPnP), Plex, virtual Linux machines etc. At times this thing has been red hot and it's always corespeechd hammering the CPU. I too have disabled all dictation options and anything else I can find related.

I repeatedly kill the process (and observer the Mac cool right down again as soon as it can), and then sure enough the process fires up again, sometimes almost immediately, other times after a period.

This is a serious bug which needs addressing. I cannot keep checking this thing every day and worrying that the Mac is red hot and doing itself a damage over time.

Hi again,

Today I spent some time looking into this more deeply. We could probably force-disable or uninstall the corespeechd service via launchctl, but that would require disabling SIP first. Before I do that I wanted to investigate the real cause.

I was able to sample corespeechd in action and one of the samples revealed this[1] stack trace. It looks like some kind of dictation is triggered,
1) corespeechd is sending data somewhere (probably to Apple) and then
2) doing some kind of re-training of "speaker model".

I guess the first one is responsible for network activity and the second one for CPU spikes.

I went into System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Dictation to check what is enabled there. It is disabled as expected but it also shows "No microphone was found". I wonder if this could be somehow related.

Anyone affected by this with an external mic available for a test? What about plugging it in and observing corespeechd behavior?

[1] See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8643914?answerId=34231755022#34231755022 · GitHub

I plugged in an old set of iPhone headphones and the mic was detected. Same ridiculous amount of data being transmitted.

FWIW, I toggled dictation services, killed corespeechd eventually tried a reboot with mic connected. Same issue.

I live in a place where upload bandwidth is hard to come by. This is really unfortunate.

UPDATE:

It seems that even with all network connections disabled data is still being transmitted. It's likely that it shows up in Network Activity as a result of the service communicating with another service via local loopback. If that's true the only impact is the intermittent CPU spikes. Console shows a ton of messages related to corespeechd file transfer to local IPV6 address.

I'm having the exact same issue here. 2018 Mac Mini i7 w/2TB SSD and 32GB of RAM running Mojave. Hopefully Apple will release a fix.

Thanks for this. I'll try these steps tonight and advise what I see.

Thank you! I've done all the steps both you and drwin1 posted. Let's see how it goes!

Wow I'm glad I came here 🙂

Since doing this, overnight corespeechd has done absolutely nothing. Zero bytes over the network and no CPU activity. Looking good so far!

I did the same thing with the activity monitor running, and saw CPU utilization go from 55% to 0%.

Thanks for finding this. I was getting tired of killing corespeechd every day to two. Let’s hope this gets a permanent fix