Woohoo!!! I'm makin' some progress here. I got the alsa working and can now here some sound through my speakers. I've read up on the speech dispatcher and speech-dup instructions, but am confused on one thing. I downloaded my latest speakup kernel from the octothorp server, but how do I know if it has software synthesis built into it? If not, how do I go about recompiling it to include this module? Do I need to go get the source RPM or something? I'm running Fedora core 3 with 2.6.12-1381 as my kernel version. Again, thanks much in advance. Guy