Espeak and pulseaudio conflicts

[Kyle]

Some of your problems sound similar to some issues I've been reading 
about in the latest pulseaudio. I'm hoping they'll be fixed soon, but 
until then, you can try to downgrade to a previous pulseaudio version if 
it's still in the repo. Otherwise, you may be able to fix some issues 
you are experiencing by fiddling with options in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf 
and /etc/pulse/default.pa, although I don't think default.pa runs when 
pulseaudio runs as a system service.

The alsa errors you are getting in espeak actually look normal. I've 
been getting these errors for a very long time, but they seem non-fatal. 
Espeak still speaks without any further complaints, so I didn't think 
there was anything to be extremely concerned about. It almost seems to 
be looking for hardware that doesn't exist, but I'm not sure why it does 
it, and it still speaks, so I just leave it alone and ignore the initial 
alsa errors. On the other hand, I can't figure out why you would be 
still getting the alsa hardware errors if you have rebuilt espeak using 
pulseaudio rather than portaudio, as in this case, espeak should only be 
using pulseaudio to send speech to your sound card. Did you install the 
development packages for pulseaudio? My guess is that it's falling back 
to portaudio because it can't find headers for pulseaudio. Look for I 
believe libpulse-dev or similar if you don't have it installed already. 
Just some thoughts, hope something helps.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/