I've done a little more testing to try and track down the problem that causes Speakup to become sluggish if hald is running when using the Dectalk USB with Speakup's Dectalk Express driver. It turns out that any action on the serial port that the Dectalk is connected to will cause the problem. For example, "echo 'Hello world.' >/dev/ttyS0" will make Speakup sluggish. Once this is done, there seems to be no way to restore normal response. I'm wondering if it was a good idea to allow the kernel to see the serial port that the synth is on? It seems to me that it was better to hide it as in previous versions. I know that this was listed as a bug, but I don't agree. Alternatively, could the serial port be marked as busy in some way? I know if you try to play two sounds at once on a single-channel sound card without using ALSA's dmix plug-in, you get an error back "device or resource busy." Can that be done to the serial port? I think that would put this problem to rest once and for all.
