What is Speech-Dispatcher?
In Ubuntu, speech-dispatcher is a background daemon that provides a high-level device-independent layer for speech synthesis (Text-to-Speech or TTS). It acts as a middleman, allowing various applications on your system (like the Orca screen reader) to send text to your speakers to be read aloud using different speech engines.
If you rely on a screen reader for accessibility, this daemon is absolutely essential. However, if you do not use any text-to-speech accessibility features, speech-dispatcher is completely unnecessary. On some Ubuntu desktop installations, it occasionally spawns multiple background processes that consume a surprising amount of RAM and CPU cycles for a feature you aren’t even using. You can safely disable it to reclaim system resources.
How to Disable Speech-Dispatcher in Ubuntu
To stop this text-to-speech service from running, you must modify its configuration file.
- Open your Ubuntu Terminal (shortcut:
Ctrl + Alt + T). - Open the speech-dispatcher default configuration file in a text editor with root privileges:
sudo nano /etc/default/speech-dispatcher- Look for the line that says
RUN=yes. - Change the
yesto ano, so the line looks exactly like this:
RUN=no- Save the file (Press
Ctrl + O, thenEnter) and exit nano (PressCtrl + X). - Next, you should aggressively kill any currently running instances of the daemon so you don’t have to reboot immediately:
killall speech-dispatcher- (Optional but Recommended): If you want to permanently remove the software so it is never re-enabled during a system update, you can purge the package entirely:
sudo apt-get purge speech-dispatcherYour system will continue to play standard audio (YouTube videos, system sounds, music) perfectly fine, but the accessibility text-to-speech engine will no longer run in the background.