Hi There!
A number of my apps are hanging in Big Sur (11.6.2). A spindump of 2 of them show them waiting for NSSpeechSynthesizer to return from CountVoices. I looked in /System/Library/Speech/Voices and it was empty. So I went to System Preferences to see what I could see. Trying to look voices up in Accessibility caused it to hang. Also trying to enter the Siri control panel.
So clearly I have a problem with speech synthesis. Why this should hang Chrome, bleep only knows. I just restored the system, so I'm not keen on doing it again, knowing it won't work. What I want to know is:
Can I install just the speech synthesis part of MacOS? Where would I find it and how? Is it a kernel extension? I think when I first install this os I skipped Siri, something I never planned to use. Is this what caused the problem? Thanks!