The speechsubmission applet works with Fedora 14, and Ubuntu 10.4.  Upgrading to a newer distro should fix the issue.

(It used to work in Fedora 10, but there was a regression issue in Fedora 12.)

Another option is to install the Sun Java JVM (instead of OpenJDK) - this seems to fix things until the OpenJDK issue gets cleared up.  

If you can, please report the issue to OpenJDK.

--- (Edited on 2/2/2011 10:52 pm [GMT-0500] by kmaclean) ---