I'm having the same difficulty as described in the original question. The documentation for SFSpeechRecognizer says that each app has limited number of requests it can make, so I'm guessing this is the case. Be prepared to handle failures caused by speech recognition limits. Because speech recognition is a network-based service, limits are enforced so that the service can remain freely available to all apps. Individual devices may be limited in the number of recognitions that can be performed per day, and each app may be throttled globally based on the number of requests it makes per day. If a recognition request fails quickly (within a second or two of starting), check to see if the recognition service became unavailable. If it is, you may want to ask users to try again later. What's interesting is that when I check isAvailable flag on speech recognizer instance, it returns true. Also, there's no way to recover from this error. I've tried reinitializing speech recognizer instance, canceling the request/task, but nothing works. What I found out is that only killing the app recovers from this error.