GRML with SpeakUp

[Glenn]

Hi,
I found an old post to this list which I kept, on starting SpeakUp in GRML.
I have tried it with both sudo and without.
I ran
modprobe speakup_soft
then I ran
espeakup
And I get no speech.
There are some rather loud and obnoxious beeps when it starts, but I followed another suggestion to try:
alsamixer
and up arrow a bunch of times, and that did not help either.
I did:
speaker-test -c 2
and I do get sound out of the speakers.
Any other ideas?
Thanks much.
Glenn