I'm with some of the others above on using Python. Writing a command line app is about as simple as: import subprocess word = 'hello' self.espeak = subprocess.Popen(['espeak', word], stdout = subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0] I think of PHP as more browser, than desktop app/webapp. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php