The great software speech server hunt

[Stephen Cagle <samedhi@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am a emacspeak newb, and am looking for a software only speech server. I seem to have a few options when it comes to emacspeak.

• Fonix software seems to have some form of dectalk for Linux, should I purchase from them here?
• espeak can be used, however, my version seems to hang once in a while, and the speech quality is not always good.
• eflite is mentioned as a alternative, but I have failed to get it to work.
  
• Finally, via-voice from IBM is mentioned as being available gratis from somewhere, but I cannot figure out where?

I am running Ubuntu 11.10, should I consider a different version of Linux? I understand that there are still some problems with alsa vs. PulseAudio and that other versions of Linux have not made the PulseAudio leap of faith.

Seems like a download area for enumerating all the different software speech servers would be very convenient, am I missing something obvious? Any help in creating a minimum emacspeak setup would be very appreciated.

Thank you.