Hi Hermann, I no longer have speech-dispatcher installed here, so if you want to work out a fix for the missing -x option for speechd-up, I would be happy to have it. The two scripts, speakwith and talkwith, are identical except that speakwith assumes your "soft" device is speech-dispatcher based, and therefore runs speechd-up when soft is selected, while talkwith assumes you will use espeak with the espeakup connector. Chuck -- The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (91% of Full) My web site: www.hallenbeck.ftml.net Microblog: http://identi.ca -------- The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it's cheaper than institutionalizing all those people.