speech-dispatcher distorts all sound

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I'm still getting this with Ubuntu 18.04, with Intel sound and HDMI output.

Workaround: when I hear the distorted sound, I open a terminal and issue this command

$ killall speech-dispatcher

This works until the next time I hit a web site that causes the issue.

I don't know anything about speech dispatcher, but I wonder if multiple speech-dispatcher processes be interfering with each other? I usually start with

$ ps uax | grep speech

and I usually see five or six processes

twt@host:~$ ps uax | grep speech
twt 9165 0.0 0.0 289000 5092 ? Sl 11:01 0:00 /usr/lib/speech-dispatcher-modules/sd_dummy /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/dummy.conf
twt 9168 0.0 0.0 289012 4976 ? Sl 11:01 0:00 /usr/lib/speech-dispatcher-modules/sd_generic /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/generic.conf
twt 9171 0.0 0.0 289000 5088 ? Sl 11:01 0:00 /usr/lib/speech-dispatcher-modules/sd_cicero /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/cicero.conf
twt 9176 0.0 0.0 327320 8756 ? Sl 11:01 0:00 /usr/lib/speech-dispatcher-modules/sd_espeak /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/espeak.conf
twt 9181 0.0 0.0 97216 2220 ? Ssl 11:01 0:00 /usr/bin/speech-dispatcher --spawn --communication-method unix_socket --socket-path /run/user/1000/speech-dispatcher/speechd.sock

My comment above about extra processes is described in Bug #1496542

This is also affecting me. I am running an Alienware R4 i7 with an 1070gt gpu.

Ubuntu has other sound issues with this laptop to. However randomly speech-dispatcher distorts all sound.

For me it's not a specific website the process seems to start whenever it wants, but doesn't always cause a problem.

I would like some attention on this though as it causes problems using Ubuntu to work remotely, as I need to communicate with my team and can't when speech-dispatcher causes problems. I'm using my Mac for now but would like to get this fixed for Ubuntu.

Affected both 16.04 and 18.04 on this laptop.
Killing the process resolves the issue until it next runs.

This affects Ubuntu 18.10 as well. Gets triggered every time while a YT video is playing and i open a website in firefox in special reading view.

Overkill in KDE because the sound error starts when checking mails in kmail or refreshing akkregator.

Removing speech-dispatcher "solves" the problem.

Yup. I have just diagnosed this as well on Cosmic. Suddenly, it started while I was watching film on Netflix in browser. I looked around and noticed three new speech-dispatcher processes connected to pulseaudio. I kept the film running and issued `killall speech-dispatcher` and the distortion stopped immediately.

For those affected by this who want or need speech-dispatcher, another workaround may be to disable timer-based scheduling for PulseAudio.

For most, this can be done by locating the following line in your default.pa file:

    load-module module-udev-detect

...and replacing it with this:

    load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

(Note: default.pa is usually "/etc/pulse/default.pa", or "~/.config/pulse/default.pa" if you have a local configuration)

This works well on my current system so far. Though, most of my machines over the past few years have been affected by this bug, and I'm not sure if it's quite worked for all of them.

18.04.2 LTS (Bionic Beaver) Gets triggered every time any sound is playing and I need any screen reading (like a website in firefox in special reading view)
It feels like the existing previous sound output gets used as input for mixing with the screen reader... with the added pronlem that at least 3 screen reader processes are created, thus adding 3 echoes that constitute the noise...

`killall speech-dispatcher` stops the noise but kills the screeen reading

It may be that it's fixed in most recent version. I am atm using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and it's the first time since 3-4 years that i do not get this error.

I was wrong, speech-dispatcher is just not installed on TW by default.

This bug is still present on 20.04 beta I installed yesterday. I was playing a song on Youtube and it became distorted as I started to read a New York Times article. Removing speech-dispatcher fixed the issue once again.

I'm experiencing this issue on my desktop and my laptop, both of which are running 19.10. The problem went away when I removed speech-dispatcher. I'm going to upgrade to 20.04 later today and will report back on whether that solves the problem.

Yes, problem persists in a fresh install (not upgrade) of 20.04 LTS. Fixed when killing or removing speech-dispatcher.

I have the same experience as Comment #14 - on a fresh install of 20.04 LTS, this problem randomly (at least it seems random) occurs and is fixed by killing speech-dispatcher.

I have the same problem. Killing speech-dispatcher fixes this, but I want to keep it available.

Could someone having the issue report it upstream on https://github.com/brailcom/speechd/issues ?

This bug started affecting me in the past week although I've been on 20.04 since launch. I have removed the packages including orca.

I will try this workaround/config change: https://github.com/brailcom/speechd/issues/198#issuecomment-619605269

My sound control panel reports three speech-dispatcher entries in Volume Levels. I don't know why.

My session is about two days old and I haven't had any instance of distortion, so the workaround referred to in my previous comment, a config change, may be a good idea for package maintainers to implement.

I started having issue's with sound being off as it were, I tried different browsers and headphones and was starting to think it was just me... then I notice in the sound settings - application tab that I had 5 speech-dispatchers going and upon doing a Google on them landed here.

Upon using the command: killall speech-dispatcher
My sound went back to normal, I never got these before what has change recently to cause this? (Specifically I had updates come through last week and since then I've had this crap)

Is this relevant? Looks it might have been swept under the rug?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1252732

I just installed Ubuntu 20.10 on a machine that was running Pop!os 20.04 and 20.10 (a fairly new AMD Ryzen desktop system, different to the machine I had the problem on earlier, which was a laptop). Not 24 hours later, this problem again. I thought there was something wrong with Team app ('bloody microsoft') but then my next meeting in Google Meet had the same problem. And YouTube.

Then I remembered this.

This time I just removed speech-dispatcher. Maybe it is not installed by default on pop, not sure. An ugly papercut.

This bug is still present in Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, running KDE Plasma.

I can duplicate the mystery "Speech Dispatcher" items in the volume control and the "killall speech-dispatcher" temporarily works around the bug.

This bug is reported (https://github.com/brailcom/speechd/issues/446#issuecomment-740828838) to be fixed in speechd 0.10.0 and higher. The 0.10.1 release notes (https://github.com/brailcom/speechd/releases/tag/0.10.1) include "Fix default pulse latency to 10ms to avoid pulseaudio distorted output."

So it's not fixed in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS,
where speech-dispatcher is 0.9.1-4

> So it's not fixed in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS,
where speech-dispatcher is 0.9.1-4

That is correct. It would be nice if the patch could be backported.

Just experienced this bug today. It seems to be triggered by certain websites. I'm not using any feature of speech-dispatcher. Until I experienced this issue I was unaware of it's existence as a daemon. Running killall speech-dispatcher corrects the issued temporarily as others have said. The problem reoccurs quite frequently however. I have no use for speech-dispatcher so I have simply uninstalled it. It's quite unfortunate that this bug exists in the default install of Ubuntu 20.04. Is nothing really going to be done to fix this?

Same problem Here using ubuntu 20.04 on a ryzen 4800h with 1650ti laptop, I have use this machine over a year and last week, the problem starts to show. Fix with deleting seech-dispatcher.

Another one experiencing this issue on 20.04 LTS. I thought I'd broke my brand new speakers. Easily triggered by using the Discord app on Firefox. Please backport a patch for this. In the meantime, uncommented "DisableAutoSpawn" in /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf

I have encountered this bug on brand new 20.04 LTS installation. The bug seems to be triggered by visiting random website that utilize speech-dispatcher. Can be fixed by enabling DisableAutoSpawn in speechd.conf

I began facing this bug starting this very week on a quite recent install, even though I have been using 20.04 LTS for quite some time now (but not on this specific machine). Appeared while using Discord (installed through a .deb package) in parallel with Firefox. I also had Spotify open in Firefox, which implies DRM code running, that maybe could interfere with the sounds outputted by my machine ?

I still see this error on Ubuntu 21.10 with speech-dispatcher 0.10.2-2build1 so the fix @linmanfu mentions unfortunately did not help.

Interesting, I've had this seemingly random garbled sound on 20.04 LTS since forever, and thought it'd be some sort of AMD HDMI output bug, and fixed by pulseaudio -k.

But I indeed noticed simply killing speech-dispatcher process fixes it as well, and now uninstalled speech-dispatcher.