Why does speech recognition take up 1 GB or RAM suddenly? And Gmail in Safari 738 MB? I did enable speech recognition just in case, but very rarely use it, and I did not remember even accidentally activating it since bootup. Now I simply have a few apps running under Mavericks, and I noticed my fan spinning, so checked Activity Monitor and see that com.apple.SpeechRecognitionCore.speechrecognitiond takes up 986.1 MB of RAM.

What could this be?

I do use Chrome Canary, and I installed the Voice Search beta extension, but I don't think it is active now, and I haven't noticed the memory issue before.

By the way, Safari Web Content takes up another 738 MB, even though only a single tab of Gmail is open. What is this about, or how can I troubleshoot it?
You can kill this process (in terminal or activity monitor), and it seems as long as the Dictation &amp; Speech pref pane (Yosemite) has dictation and enhanced dictation off and the pref pane is not open, it won't re-spawn.

See for ref:

http://www.mcelhearn.com/os-x-10-9-mavericks-enhanced-dictation-is-a-memory-hog-and-doesnt-work-very-well/

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5824504