Without pulseaudio installed, I was able to choose festival for speech output and alsa for output device when running spd-conf inside speech-dispatcher on archlinux. This is necessary to have speech from orca in any graphical user interface. Since espeak-ng and espeak conflict I loose speech in the console installing espeak-ng since documentation and probably systemd service files for espeak-ng appear missing. So I install gnome which has orca in it. The pulseaudio package installs along with all of its core gnome dependencies and I try two things after that in order. First in console run spd-conf again and pick festival as speech device and pulseaudio as output device and spd-say is silenced. So I try spd-conf again and pick festival for speech device and alsa as output device. Again silence from spd-say. Next I run startx and get into gnome and try running orca. All of the sudden none of the voice files festival was provisioned with can be found anymore and orca dies with an error. The last thing I'm going to try with archlinux is a jenux install and go for the graphical environment on the install and see if that works. Slint actually uses espeak-ng and I have that running on another drive to keep me in the game when failures like this happen. All of this has been an interesting adventure. --
