I use MacinTalk Pro more than any other bolt-on. Running 8.5.1 I have 
absolutely no problems with it - and I routinely change the voices, pitch,
speed, etc.

Somewhere, I've got a program I wrote a long time ago which allows you to
control every parameter in MacinTalk - it leant heavily on the stuff done in
IB. If you'd like a copy to test out Macintalk, I'll see if I can find it -
EMail me direct. It's somewhere in the 40 or so Gigs of stuff I've got lying
around.

But I would bet that if your MacinTalk is stuttering, it's not MacinTalk
that's causing it. Go back to a clean system and start again.

Finally Jonathon said :

> It sounds more like _something_ is grabbing bunches of
> CPU time 'greedily' and not letting speech (which is CPU heavy) get the
> smooth time that it needs.

He's probably right about the CPU time, but I'm not sure he's right about
speech being CPU heavy. Once the resources are loaded, there's surprisingly
little CPU overhead - on my Radar Simulator, you can't see any effect at all
when speech is activated, even on a 604e/166 - and there's LOTS of other
stuff going on at the same time.

Phil.