Remote service voices are causing problems

[jessegreenberg]

Described in phetsims/qa#1263. In particular, the "Google US English" voice seemed broken. It would get cut off and interrupted. I suspect this is happening because the remote service gets interrupted or can't finish the stream.

In phetsims/number-pairs#164 we changed the voice sorting so that the remote voices are lower in the list. Is that sufficient? If so, we could maintenance release sims with that sorting.

If not, we could remove all remote service voices so only local ones are available. Remote service voices sound really nice, so it would be a bummer to lose them. But if they are buggy, then we probably shouldn't use them.

[jessegreenberg]

I just tried to reproduce the problem with @samreid, but we did not see it on his machine.

I realized there is probably an error event for the speech synthesis that we are handling now but we can probably look there for more information. Lets look there first.

If there is nothing helpful, I think we should remove the remote service voices from the list.

[jessegreenberg]

This is related to phetsims/number-pairs#164 (comment).

While debugging with @matthew-blackman, we found that the "Google US English" voice does not trigger the start or end event at all, even though output often works and without delay. There are many places in utterance-queue that are counting on these events.

Some searching brought me to Chromium and google bug reports opened recently which describe this exact problem: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/409717085 and also https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/423933057?pli=1.

I am checking in on slack about how we should proceed.