I may never know for sure, because this problem was intermittent, but it seemed to go away after I started to cancel right before speak.
utter = new window.SpeechSynthesisUtterance("cat");
window.speechSynthesis.cancel();
window.speechSynthesis.speak(utter);
I don't think the cancel necessarily has to come between the utterance object creation and use. Just that it come before every speak. I may have had a different problem as I was only creating one utterance object, not a bunch. I did only see it on Chrome 78. Using Windows 7, 64-bit. Never saw the problem on Firefox or Edge.
EDIT 2 weeks later. No recurrences after several dozen tries. It seems .cancel() solved my problem. My symptoms were: calling speechSynthesis.speak() in Chrome would sometimes not start the speech. There were no immediate indications of a problem in the code, speechSynthesis.speaking
would be true and .pending
would be false. There would be no events from the utterance object. Normally, when speech would work, I'd get a 'start'
event about 0.1 seconds after calling .speak().