Jonathan, Nice job. Thanks for this upgrade. The default volume of the speak command is okay, but I had a bit of a time getting speech-dispatcher 0.6.1 to match the volume. Maybe Hynek has a suggestion on that score. What finally worked for me was to change the parameter "-a $VOLUME" to "-a 50" in the espeack-generic-conf file, after trying a variety of other possible fixes. Out of the box, the speech-dispatcher espeak-generic-conf settings volume was much too low. Thanks again for a very nice job. Keep up the good work. Chuck -- The Moon is Full Only 10 kinds of people: those who do binary, and those who do not. But you can get a few downloads from http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh and remember, INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!