Speech is in many ways the most neglected area of Sound Reinforcement. 
How often have I come across companies and engineers with the attitude: we only need to put a basic system in: a couple of speakers on sticks and a cheap mixer (implying not neccessarily the best speakers/control/mics etc), often with poor outcome.
We take the same care with speech based events as we do with Music and Theatre, good equipment, correctly positioned speakers with delays and fills, and years of experience.

We all listen to speech a lot, and it deserves to be amplified properly, reaching every member of the audience at a good listening level, with good articulation, and a natural sound.

For many years we having been supplying sound at Bath Literature Festival and Bath Kid's Literature Festival. The main venue is Bath Guildhall, an eighteenth century room with acoustics to match and always challenging.
With careful equalisation, delays and fills we give every audience member a good experience.

For Bath Guildhall we supply:

Soundcraft GB4 16/4/2 mixer and multicore
4 BSS FCS960 graphics inserted on subgroups for each mic type
6 ch Drawmer compressors
Surrey Electronics stabiliser
1 pr Nexo PS10, flown from truss
1 pr Nexo PS10 as delays
Renkus CFX-61 front fills and JBL Control One as rear corner fills
Sennheiser e300 radio mics with MKE-2
Sennheiser e100 hand-held radios
Feed to induction loop and loop tester
Q&A foldback speakers