I put together a document on how to start software speech automatically if no hardware synth is found. I tested this on my laptop with a doubletalk LT external synth. If the hardware synth is connected, it does not load software speech. The speech-dispatcher package for debian already comes with a script to start speech-dispatcher at boot time. I wrote 2 other scripts, one to echo sftsyn to /proc/speakup/synth_name if no hardware synth is configured and the other to start speechd-up. For more info and to download the scripts see: http://www.math.wisc.edu/~jheim/stuff/softsynth.html
