I have found that as of yesterday, the Dectalk Express driver is completely broken. I installed Slackware 12.1, and tried compiling a custom kernel. When I booted with this kernel, the Dectalk USB I have set to serial mode was found, but speech was unusable. An occasional letter or word would be spat out randomly, and the computer slowed to a crawl. When I hit print screen to kill Speakup, I heard "you." About 30 seconds later, I heard "killed." It took another 30 seconds before I heard "Speakup." So, I reverted back to the stock speakup.s, and patched in the older release of Speakup that it came with. This was dated 4/16/08. This version works, and finally fixes the long-standing bug where words with apostrophes were pronounced as if the apostrophe was a space. However, the speakupconf script doesn't work with this version, and it is impossible to modify the characters file which lists pronunciations of characters. Still, it's a lot better than nothing, and at least the rate and pitch can be changed by writing to those virtual files. Since there is so much development going on, I think I'll stick with this version for awhile.
