Text-to-Speech auto play, race condition?

I have the Text-to-Speech tool working where it reads the text from the database, renders the page, creating the sayText function with the correct item to say, and runs.  Works great most the time, but it seems on occasion, the audio isn't playing. I put a 3 second delay using setTimeout, and that helps some, but on first load in a browser (no cache), and some slower connections, it occasionally stays silent.  If i click the replay button, it then works immediately, so I suspect there is a race condition happening where the js functions aren't able to trigger the flash to execute properly b/c the flash isn't loaded yet (or the include PHP file isn't loaded)  
Any idea how i can be sure that the file is loaded before triggering sayText?