Emacspeak discussion list

[Parham Doustdar <parham90 AT gmail.com>]

Hi,

Could it be the voice? Can you try changing it to Alex for example?

The issue with queuing does happen regardless, I have already raised this.

HTH,

Parham

Sent from my iPhone

On 23 Mar 2026, at 08:08, Tiresias <emacspeak AT emacspeak.net> wrote:

Hi Arkadius

Here is the relevant section of my initialisation file, the issue still persists even after stripping it down to this.:

;;; -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

;; Set up emacspeak before everything else so that it runs even if there's an error later on

;; (toggle-debug-on-error)

;; In case it crashes

(defun emacspeak-restart ()

  (interactive)

  (setq dtk-program "mac")

  (load-file "~/emacspeak/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el")

  (setq mac-default-voice-string "[{voice Karen-premium}]")

  ;; Customising emacspeak

  (global-set-key (kbd "M-c") 'emacspeak-speak-current-column)

  (dtk-set-rate 720 t)

  (setq emacspeak-auditory-icon-function 'emacspeak-serve-auditory-icon)

  (setq emacspeak-pronounce-dictionaries-file (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/pronounciations.el"))

  (setq emacspeak-play-program "afplay")

  (keymap-global-set "C-e r" 'emacspeak-restart))

(emacspeak-restart)

This works fine though the speech server generally seems to respond slowly.

Changing “Mac” to “swiftmac” however makes it more responsive in most situations but as of updating MacOS a few weeks ago it is slow in certain situations as if it is queuing speech wrong.

I tried with emacs -nw and the same behaviour occurs.

Best regards, Isaac

On 19 Mar 2026, at 5:45 pm, Arkadiusz <nuno69a AT gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Isaac,

what is your config file? I've had the similar issue, to check whether its the same, try doing emacs -nw in the terminal and see if it still lags.

Sent from my iPhone

On 19 Mar 2026, at 02:49, Tiresias <emacspeak AT emacspeak.net> wrote:

Hi Victor

I’ve done some more investigating, completely stripped back my init file and tried messing around with some emacspeak internals to no success.

I believe the latest macOS update has somehow broken how swiftmac responds to events or is queuing what to say, even the dtk-stop command doesn’t seem to work for several seconds if I move around certain buffers rapidly.

For example, if starting at the top of the default scratch buffer, if I press C-n C-p for around 10-20 times in rapid succession, emacspeak will repeat ;; several times before doing anything else as if each line has been queued and takes a second or so for it to process there’s new text to announce.

If I go to the end of that same buffer however and type several of my own lines then repeat the same process with the new lines, it will will not buffer like that and will respond immediately if I navigate else where.

While this specifically isn’t a major issue, similar things occur when rapidly navigating through code or switching buffers with ido where it is an issue.

I’ve reverted to using the old Mac speech server which does not have the same issue however it does generally feel slightly slower which is why I started using the swiftmac server previously.

I also tried using the latest swiftmac server downloaded from the GitHub page however was unable to select any voices successfully other then the default low quality one and it seemed to have the same issue with some speech seemingly being queued no matter what.

To confirm, I’m on macOS 26.3.1

I’m not really sure where to go from here but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards, Isaac

P.S. Also I’m not sure why but it seems like my emails are now using my google username rather then my actual name, not sure how to fix that sorry.

 

On 8 Mar 2026, at 5:09 pm, Victor Tsaran <vtsaran AT gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Isaac.

Which version of Emacs are you running?

Are you using Swiftmac as your speech synthesizer?

I am on the same version on Mac OS as you and do not see any speech latency issues. However, I do not use ido buffers. Is this the only place where you see the regression?

On Sat, Mar 7, 2026 at 5:41 PM Isaac Leonard <emacspeak AT emacspeak.net> wrote:

Hi All
It’s been a while since I’ve interacted with the mailing list so apologies if I am covering previously discussed topics.

I recently updated my MacBook to macOS 26.3 and have since been experiencing far slower speech feedback from emacspeak with typing in Ido buffers seeming to almost have a 1 second delay and far greater delays when scrolling even moderately large buffers though that might be related to other processes like LSP.
I’ve reinstalled emacs to make sure that wasn’t the problem but nothing changed.
I went to go and update emacspeak as it has been a while since I had built the latest version and noticed that there were no updates and the last commit on the GitHub was made a year and a half ago in august 2024.
I searched the archives and found that T.V. Raman had to step away from the project however I imagine this hasn’t halted development entirely as the list seems to still be relatively active.
Is there somewhere new that changes are being made until T.V. Raman can return to the project?

If not, what is the plan going forward for emacspeak as I imagine future changes to emacs will eventually mean it will stop working properly.

In the mean time, does anyone know what I could try to make the speech return to normal for me?

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