Hi, You could grep the output of dmesg. Speakup always writes messages when a synth has timed out. Perhaps something like this would work: dmesg | tail | grep -i deactivated You could run a cron job every 30 minutes or so which could check and switch to software speech. By using tail, it only shows the most recent messages so you shouldn't get old results once you've switched. You could also have your script check if software speech is already being used and just abort if it is. On 9/6/2009 9:56 PM, covici at ccs.covici.com wrote: > Hi. In the old days, even if I had a synthesizer built in the kernel, I > could check and if speakup had deactivated because the synth was not > connected, the name would be changed to none. I would like to be able > to do this now because I want to automatically switch to a software > synth if my hardware one is not connected. However, the name of the > synth remains tthe same making it more difficult to do this. >