Clicking Cancel reached the daemon and the queue cancelled the item, but the sound played on to the end: oto v3's Player.Close only relies on the garbage collector's finalizer, so the player stayed in the mix. Pause takes it out immediately; only the device buffer (about 100 ms) drains. Same fix covers talk cancel and daemon shutdown. Direct speech via spd-say: killing the waiting client did not stop speech-dispatcher either; on cancel it now sends `spd-say -S`. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>