Welcome,
pocketsphinxDidDetectSpeech is a delegate method, so you don’t want to delay it since you don’t call it directly, you just want to address the underlying functionality that you control directly which is whether recognition is engaged or not. Suspending recognition before playing your sound and resuming it afterwards should work perfectly for the goal of halting recognition during other media playback, so if it isn’t working perfectly we should figure out why. What happens when you suspend before you play your sound back and resume after your sound is done playing?