for those who want console speech in manjaro based distros

[Chris Brannon]

Jude DaShiell <jdashiel at panix.com> writes:

> Can you loose the -ng fork and try a build with generic espeak and
> verify identical alsa issues with the non-fork version of espeak?
> That would for sure point at defective alsa code.

Well, the original espeak does not interface directly with alsa.  It
uses portaudio.  And it works just fine.  It's what I use every day.

I'm not running pulse over here at all, although I do have the client
libraries, because many packages link against them.
For the -ng fork, I built the audio backend with pulse disabled, and
then I verified that it was in fact not linked against pulse client
libraries at all.
I also noticed that it can support OSS, so I did a further test with OSS
disabled, just in case it was trying to use OSS and having difficulty
due to ALSA's OSS emulation.
It's definitely using ALSA,
and the emacspeak speech server is failing to speak when
linked against it.  Well, it does speak the initial greeting,
but after that, additional speech commands produce the error message:
"File descriptor in bad state".

-- Chris