Hi,
Sorry, this usage approach is a little outside what I can support since OpenEars is actively designed not to be a push-to-talk tool and pathToTestFile is for automated testing of the entire audio and recognition harness rather than a WAV recognition method.
For your own further troubleshooting I would check out if you get better results with recordings made by the SaveThatWave demo, comparing results to see if there is a difference between a SaveThatWave audio file and the ones you are creating, which should give you some hints about what to look into, and whether you get better recognition results when submitting the WAV to runRecognitionOnWavFileAtPath: etc, which is the method designed for doing file-based recognition rather than pathToTestFile which is intended as an automated testing tool.