In article <BAY103-DAV786181796A5528CB285258E8A0 at phx.gbl>, > Anyway what have I done. Portaudio18 does not support alsa, so I > compiled espeak with portaudio19. I think some versions of portaudio19 work better than others. Try using the latest development snapshot of portaudio19 from: http://www.portaudio.com/ and the eSpeak version 1.20 from: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ I'm not very familiar with topics such as portaudio and also, but Gilles Casse <gcasse at oralux.org> has been looking at this.