The problem with the long pauses after keystrokes is caused by some process or other trying to access the serial port that the Dectalk USB is on. Apparently, the HAL daemon is one which does this. I had heard that it has been deprecated. You can easily reproduce the problem by trying to echo text to the serial port. On my system, I have some code in my rc.local startup script which switches back and forth before restoring the settings. Here is what I do. #configure Speakup #First, work around the annoying Dectalk bug. echo "soft" >/sys/accessibility/speakup/synth echo "dectlk" >/sys/accessibility/speakup/synth /usr/local/bin/speakupconf load
