I had this issue also a while now. It's been extremely frustrating. However System Settings > Privacy & Security > Developer Tools and check Xcode is added and toggled on fixed it for me. At least I haven't had any issues yet after doing those settings. It should be commuinicated more promient. Even Claude AI didn't suggest that as a solution.

Never mind. It appears to work. There was some other issue that prevented the speech to work as expected.

ok, figured it out... would like to delete above post... but appears to be not possible...