espeakup stops speaking

[Frank Carmickle]

Hi all,

For a very long time now I’ve been operating with a then Jessie, now Stretch, VMware Fusion virtual machine as my main everyday Linux box. I have a need for some things in sid and so I thought I’d update another vm image that I had kicking around. Both of these images, built from very different install media, and with lots of time in between, I had held the following packages, due to speech just stopping, requiring to restart espeakup.

espeak1.48.04+dfsg-5
espeak-data:amd641.48.04+dfsg-5
espeakup1:0.80-1
libespeak1:amd641.48.04+dfsg-5
espeak-data:amd641.48.04+dfsg-5
espeakup1:0.80-1
libasound2:amd641.1.1-2
libasound2-data1.1.1-2
libespeak1:amd641.48.04+dfsg-5

I’m trying to remember exactly why I had held libasound back also. I believe that it was due to sluggishness in flushing the audio buffer, not being able to stop speech quickly enough.

Last week I decided to unhold these packages on a sid system and I found that things still hadn’t improved. I am finding it hard to believe that this would be happening to everyone. Does anyone have any ideas? I see nothing in the logs and it doesn’t appear that espeakup is crashing. It is happening with both espeak and espeak-ng current in sid.

Thank you very much for any ideas.
—FC