Illustrator Keyboard Shortcuts Not Working -- fixed

I'm posting this in case someone else finds they have the same issue. The keyboard shortcuts were only ocassionally working with Illustrator 2020 on my MacBook and performance was generally painfully slow and laggy. Research here suggested it might be the Wacom drivers interferring with the keyboard, so I went through the laborious process of deleting them and installing fresh, with no joy. And I cleaned up my hard drive, unloaded fonts, cleared more disk space for scratch space. And still no keyboard short cuts and menu taking to a count of 13 to drop down, and so on. I was ready to take my baseball bat to the computer because even with all of this I was pushing a deadline. Finshed the work, but it took five times as long as it should have. 

Anyway to get to the point, I discovered today by accident, that the speech recognition was turned on on my MacBook. How that happened I do not know, but the minute I turned it off, the keyboard shortcuts started working again. And, of course, everything else got faster, too.  Interestingly, however, is the fact that speech recognition ONLY interferred with Illustrator. Keyboard shortcuts remained in effect in InDesign and Photoshop and they did not experience the lagginess that I found in Illustrator. I realize that Illustrator is resource intensive, and that speech recognition is also resource intentive, but it should not have interferred with key recognition. 

I put this out there for anyone else looking for seemingly random reasons why their systems aren't working as expected.