Reducing emacspeak verbosity / chattiness

[Ben Humphreys <brhbrhbrh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

As a new emacspeak user, I'm finding I'm sometimes overwhelmed by the 
amount of verbosity and sounds within the default configuration.

Today I discovered the option to eliminate the emacspeak startup icon:

(setq emacspeak-play-emacspeak-startup-icon nil)

This is helpful.

There are some other areas though where I'd like to reduce chattiness, such as:

1. On startup, I hear multiple overlapping voices which I cannot 
understand but some of the words are:
"via voice"
"wise dog"
"49.0"
"all circuits functioning perfectly"
and a bunch of stuff underneath that that may be generic emacs stuff.

Is there a setting to suppress any of this?

2. When switching buffers with C-x C-b, one buffer reads for example:

% *notifications* special document with size 0

Is there a way to reduce the verbosity here?

I saw a reference to emacspeak-bs and thought this might be a more 
speech-enabled and terse way of switching buffers but when I execute 
it, I hear:

"This command can only be used in buffer menus."

3. How do I stop speech?  In Jaws, pressing Caps Lock or Ctrl by 
itself will stop speech but this does not seem to work the same in 
emacspeak.  Is there a simple one key way to stop speech?

4. Is there an easy way to update a pronunciation dictionary?  For example:
"yyyy-mm-dd"
could be
"4 digit year mm dd"
instead of the way it's actually pronounced
"i i -millimeter-dd"

5. emacspeak seems to load up several extra buffers that regular 
emacs does not.  For example:
warnings
compile-log
notifications

Is there a way of suppressing these from the buffer list when using 
C-x C-b or C-x left- and right-arrow?

P.S. I'm using voxin as my speech synthasizer.

Thank you to all for help with any of these

Ben