DevOps Pipeline MacOS problems with speech: say command can lock process for 1 hour

Question

We are working on an automated process for testing the aria-at design patterns with various screen readers. The process runs a special "voice" which can capture speech events from the system while it runs some automated testing on web browsers. This process currently is working on github actions, but we've wanted to port it over to pipelines for various reasons.

The general problem we are facing on azure pipelines is very buggy behavior of the macos speech systems when running on the macos-14 hosted image. Executing the macos say command will spin lock the shell for the full 60 minute timeout allowed by the pipeline.  A very reduced test of one symptom is here: https://dev.azure.com/bocoup/aria-at-automation/_build/results?buildId=134&view=logs&j=12f1170f-54f2-53f3-20dd-22fc7dff55f9 (based on this pipeline file: https://github.com/gnarf/azure-pipelines-testing/blob/2e23976bbd8c01c23da84bd697b39667e471e9c7/azure-pipelines.yml#L10 ) - It should say this text and then return control to the shell continuing on.   We have noticed that after installing our voice, this delay can be significantly shortened to ~6 minutes ( https://dev.azure.com/bocoup/aria-at-automation/_build/results?buildId=133&view=logs&j=12f1170f-54f2-53f3-20dd-22fc7dff55f9&t=5c8eafdc-0581-572c-1ae7-be1b3726f4cd&l=491 ) but still seems to be indicative of some deeper problem, as we never receive any voice readings from VoiceOver or other speech tools when executing the tests (all responses collected are blank).  Also, this 6 minute version isn't guaranteed after we install the voice, I still see it fail with a 60 minute timeout from time to time in testing. https://dev.azure.com/bocoup/aria-at-automation/_build/results?buildId=142&view=logs&j=12f1170f-54f2-53f3-20dd-22fc7dff55f9&t=35f53584-79fc-539f-463c-6471d0663a3a&l=18 -- Trying to reduce the pipeline complexity to only install our voice and try say still results in a 60 minute timeout, unless we delay by a few minutes before trying. In the longer pipeline with more tasks between installing the voice it usually has the (still wrong) 6 minute delay. https://dev.azure.com/bocoup/aria-at-automation/_build/results?buildId=145&view=logs&j=12f1170f-54f2-53f3-20dd-22fc7dff55f9&t=dee4e6ec-be1b-5671-4678-ab293b4004c5&l=17 - Even with the "6 minute dealy" version, we seem to receive no speech output from VoiceOver (it seems to not be reading the chrome/safari windows opened)

This process runs quite well on GitHub actions, and an example run https://github.com/bocoup/aria-at-gh-actions-helper/actions/runs/10601504445/job/29381421878#step:12:26executes the say command in only a few seconds.  I tried to dig a little deeper on the list of processes running on each image and examined processes ( ps aux ) and manually trimming the table down to only process names piping them through sort.  Then I ran a diff between the pipelines and github lists.  I'm hoping that there is some process that we can start/restart/configure to fix these delays in the macOS speech system, but I can't find any good ideas searching on google.  I have already tried restarting coreaudiod, corespeechd, and a few others, but can't seem to find the right combination of things to configure the macos-14 vm image to be able to speak without this delay.

Curious if anyone has any thoughts, or has run into any similar issues while dealing with audio or speech on the azure hosted macos images.

Answer 1

Hi Corey Frang,
Thanks for the question and using MS Q&A platform.

Azure DevOps is currently not supported in the Microsoft Q&A platform; the supported products are listed over here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/products (more to be added later on).

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