Current voice options and ALSA compatibility

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

Once again it's time for me to pop out of nowhere and ask a few  
random GNOME accessibility questions. :)

I recently bought a new PC that doesn't have serial ports. As such,  
I'm exclusively using softsynths. I suspect, however, that festival/ 
flite doesn't play well with ALSA/ESD. Whenever Orca/Gnopernicus is  
running, no other sounds can play. This was OK on my low-end, circa  
2000 cheap Dell laptop, but it isn't acceptable to me on a full  
desktop where I might want to play music or games in addition to  
working. Also, the festival voices are quite poor in quality, and  
aren't exactly what I want to listen to for very long periods. :)

So, what other options are there? A brief glance through the gnome- 
speech drivers directory reveals freetts, which from what I can  
gather is basically festival repackaged. There's a Cepstral 2.x  
driver when cepstral is now at 4.0, though the cepstral voices don't  
work well when sped up, anyway. There's a viavoice driver, but  
googling for "viavoice linux" reveals lots of press releases. Am I  
not looking hard enough or in the right place? I've looked at the  
dectalk site, but it seems that the only versions being sold are 4.63  
and 5.0. Has anyone tested the 4.61 driver with 4.63, and if so, does  
it work?

The big question for me, though, is whether any of these voices will  
resolve this ALSA/ESD issue? The card may not be full duplex (it's an  
onboard Intel HD audio chip, so it wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't)  
but it seems like ALSA would handle the mixing natively and make it  
appear to be full. I'm also guessing that festival is still using  
OSS, and perhaps using the OSS layer blocks the rest of the system  
somehow whereas using the ALSA devices would work fine, but I don't  
know for sure. I've also tried using the ESD wrapper program with  
festival and, while that fixed my inability to use accessibility and  
play other sound, it also caused speech to overlap in odd ways.

Thoughts? I'd really like to get this system up and running  
satisfactorally.