It could be a soundcard issue as well. On my Dell, I find that if I were to run the software Dectalk directly, it sounds like a motorboat. However, if I run it using the aoss scripts, it sounds much better. That is, it's an Alsa thing with this card. So, if I want it to say "hello world," I'd type the line like: aoss say -a "Hello world." This gives me much better results with the Dectalk, but doesn't work with Flite. Actually, as I recall, I didn't start having problems with Flite until I cranked up the speech rate. There are definitely some issues with various sound cards and Alsa. Another test is to try playing soundds at various sample rates. I find that sounds sampled at low rates when played by Mplayer will be choppy, and there will be warnings on the console about underruns. Older sound cards seem to be more reliable in terms of performance under Linux.
