Further to my previous on this subject, I have a couple of observations and a question. In case any of this is useful, I downloaded the latest testing i386 and am64 debian testing. As suggested, I could not get hardware speech on either of them. I got software speech on the am64 but failed to with the i386 but I did not spend much time trying to figure out why. I also have a system which started out as squeeze and is now running testing and hardware speech continues to work. So, I have a 64 bytt machine and it seems for the moment, hardware speech is not going to work so I am wondering if/how I can get software speech working in the cli with speakup and with orca in the gui? Also, I am hoping that software speech will be more reliable than it seems to be in the gui, I cannot count the number of times when I have depended on speakup and my old apollo after software speech in the gui has stopped working. Thanks for any pointers. regards keith