I just thought of this. Are you running speech-dispatcher from extra or the speech-dispatcher-git package from AUR? Speech-dispatcher in extra seems to be properly configured to run in either user or system mode. But I couldn't get speech-dispatcher-git to run in user mode and didn't try running it in system mode, although it constantly attempted to find its socket in /var, which is only supposed to apply if run system-wide. It wouldn't surprise me in this case to find that there are other problems with the speech-dispatcher-git configuration. Perhaps it's currently broken and will be fixed in the near future, or perhaps something has changed in the default configuration that I'm unsure how to fix to make it run correctly here. ~Kyle
