Hello Hugh and others, Well, I stalled everything according to the documentation, rebooted, started the festival server and middleware, and actually got speech. The major concern I have is that festival is way behind anything I am try to do. This may be partially due to the slowness of festival. The second problem I'm having is that festival doesn't speak when I use the keypad. This may be something I'm not doing although I checked the option to use speakup as the default keymap. The next step may be to look at using flite instead of festival because it should improve the response time. This is a great start and the gang at WPI is to be congratulated for moving speakup into the software synth age. I'm wondering whether middleware could be rewritten to use eflite or some of the other emacspeak servers such as viavoice and software dectalk. Chris
