Hi William and many thanks for your message.  I tried exactly what you 
suggested, booting into the live DVD and typing 'gentoo 
speakup.synth=dectlk nox' at the boot prompt.  My Dectalk USB started 
speaking as it should, but after all Alsa modules were loaded, it 
announced that no Alsa configuration was present and that I'd have to 
unmute my card.  Sorry I couldn't record the exact message.  I then 
launched Alsamixer, unmuting all channels and turning them up to full 
volume.  After pressing 'Escape' to save the settings, I played an MP3 
file with Mplayer to ensure that my card was unmuted.  This file played 
successfully.  I next typed 'espeak "Hello,this is a test."' as you 
suggested.  There was no error, but I heard no speech at all.  Finally, 
I repeated the same procedure, but output the result to a Wave file.  I 
played this successfully in Mplayer.

In conclusion, Espeak appears to be able to creat Wave files on my 
system, but does not appear to be able to speak through Alsa, even when 
all my sound card's channels are unmuted.  I would very much appreciate 
any advice you may have as to how to resolve this.

yours sincerely,

John Robinson







On 09/10/09 21:28, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 09:02:18PM +0100, John Robinson wrote:
>    
>> Hi everyone.  I've just been testing the current Gentoo AMD64 live DVD
>> available from
>>
>> http://mirrors.sfo1.gni.com/Gentoo/ten/livedvd-amd64-10.0-20090909-0915.iso  and have no problems when booting into it with hardware speech.  I am, however, unable to get software speech to work, try as I might.  Typing 'gentoo speakup.synth=dectlk nox' makes my Dectalk USB set up like a Dectalk Express work every time.  When I type 'gentoo speakup.synth=soft nox' at the boot prompt, I get no speech at all.  I have not filed a bug about this, because it's very probably been resolved by someone on this list who knows much more about all this than I do!  Any advice about how to get software speech working when I boot this live DVD would be very much appreciated.  If you need any information about my computer system, please let me know.
>>
>> Yours sincerely,
>>      
> Hi John,
>
> Ok, try this:
>
> Bring it up with hardware speech, then,  try something like this:
>
> espeak 'hello, this is a test.'
>
> That should make espeak say 'hello, this is a test.'  If that works, we
> know that alsa is being set up correctly.  Let me know if this works,
> or, if it doesn't, it is important to know what the message is you get.
>
> Thanks,
>
>