On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 09:55:01PM +0100, John Robinson wrote:
> 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.
 
 Ok John, we found this issue, and we are working on building another
 image that will allow espeak to speak through alsa.

The other thing I am concerned about though is your sound card.  When
you started alsamixer was everything still muted?

William