Swift or Objective-C command line tool and text to speech not outputting audio

Question

I am writing a morse code command line tool for Mac OS X written with Swift as a scripting language. I want to give the user the option to hear the morse code using Apple's NSSpeechSynthesizer. I can get this to work inside an app no sweat. But inside a command line tool or a Swift script the startSpeakingString() function is not audible--unless I step through the code line by line.

Here is the code in Swift (it's the same for a proper command line tool or a script)

import Foundation
import AppKit

var synth:NSSpeechSynthesizer = NSSpeechSynthesizer.init()
synth.startSpeakingString("dit dah")

And here is the code in an Objective-C command line tool

@import Foundation;
@import AppKit;

int main(int argc, const char * argv[]) {
    @autoreleasepool {
         NSSpeechSynthesizer *synth = [[NSSpeechSynthesizer alloc] init];
         [synth startSpeakingString:@"dit dah"];
    }
    return 0
}

The NSSpeechSythesizer instance seems legit in all cases. The startSpeakingString() function returns true in all cases. Here is my repo (work in progress): https://github.com/jpavley/swift-scripts

Answer 1

NSSpeechSynthesizer.isAnyApplicationSpeaking() waits until the speech is finished.

import Foundation
import AppKit

class Speaker: NSObject , NSSpeechSynthesizerDelegate {
    var synth : NSSpeechSynthesizer!

    func run() {
        self.synth = NSSpeechSynthesizer.init()
        self.synth.delegate = self
        self.synth.startSpeakingString("First word")
        while(NSSpeechSynthesizer.isAnyApplicationSpeaking() == true) {}
    }
}

var speak : Speaker = Speaker.init()
speak.run()