my version of the driver is 5 years old. The computer itself was made back in 2017, and back then, the driver was Notorious for having memory leak issues, as well as audio device issues. I did attempt to disable it, and that has fixed the issue someone. However, that doesn't stop it from having a fun time every once in awhile. They did fix it recently, however, my computer cannot get the updates for the driver.

Here's a free tip, which I hope may help in future. It's odd, but works.
I recently installed something that broke sound devices, so NVDA went to nowhere.
Thing is, I *always* have it connected to a remote server, so I just opened up the non-official NVDA Remote app on iPhone, connected to my PC and let my phone do the talking. I didn't need to connect a keyboard to the phone of course, since I was still at the physical machine, but just used it to reset my sound devices and get things going again.
If you set it up so that your machine connects with your custom key to a server of some kind, and you have either another computer, or your phone to-hand, you *should* be able to bring speech back without help in-future.