On your comment about using alsa in the espeak specific module and /dev/dsp being blocked, well this is possibly to do with alsa. When using alsa, you shouldn't try and use OSS systems directly. You will need to use alsa-oss emulation. I think there is two ways to do oss emulation with alsa, kernel emulation (where I think you can just use /dev/dsp directly, or via the aoss command (eg. aoss realplay would start realplayer using the software oss emulation of alsa). Your comment about the voices is very valid, and if the speech-dispatcher developers would like to improve the espeak module, I think it would be good to have control over the espeak voices to symbolic voice name mappings. It may be possible to hack round this by removing any espeak voice data files not needed, but I am unsure of this and don't know that I could recommend it unless the person doing it was certain of what they were actually doing. Also I don't know if that hack would work for being able to access voices from different languages. As suggested by others, there has been some particular problems on certain hardware, so to see if it might be, what type of system is it (eg. type of processor). From Michael Whapples
