Software Speech

[David Csercsics]

I'm using pulseaudio but I can get alsa to work as well. I think you
could be hitting some issue where some version of portaudio you have
installed wants to use the oss emulation which does not mix multiple
sounds. Pulseaudio does a nice job of mixing though so maybe you should
try that. You'l likely have to rebuild your espeak package though to link
it against pulseaudio as I think the distros don't do that by default.