Hello John and Ishe and the friendly emacspeak group.
I have occasionally had the emacspeak installer not do a successful installation but I completely uninstalled the installer from my system, use the same installer but there is a switch to use - that is after the command to run the script a further comment like --uninstall - but I'm not sure of what the switch is, so check with --help after the installer name.
Before uninstalling check with voxin-say to see what languages you have installed and then to make them speak.
voxin-say -L
Will give you a list of installed languages.
The name of the language must appear in the voxin.ini file for this to be spoken.
After you see your language to see what's installed, try having it speak.
voxin-say "Hello John and Ishe, this is voxin speaking" | aplay
Where | is the bar which on a USA keyboard is the key above ENTER shifted.
Remember this only works for the old IBM TTS voxin voices, as the Voxin Embedded voices - which are much nicer - do not have a speech engine inside emacspeak. Hopefully someone will volunteer, they are excellent voices.
I'd be happy to help you off list as at least the initial setting up of voxin is probably off topic, but of course if a moderator emails me to continue, I will be glad to help.
I'm only an expert (ha, ha) because I keep doing it right, but I was only able to do it because of Gilles Casee's expert assistance. I think I annoyed him so much, he wrote Father Christmas and told him to fill my Christmas boxes with coal dust. Only kidding,Â
Gilles, you wouldn't do this, but I did ask many questions and received much help from you even though I must have asked stupid questions, you gave me all the information and help I needed which I am passing along freely to others!
If you get voxin-say "words to speak" | aplay to speak, the most usual problem is conflicting speech-dispatcher and voxin configuration files. I installed mlocate then as root ran "updatedb" then find voxin.ini and spd.conf and delete them all. I can still see so I don't know if this is wise if you don't have enough sight to see the console or terminal. Gilles would know which of these files are the correct locations for the files. The other and safer method is to find the voxin.ini and spd.conf file with the latest date and time and replace all the other files of the same name with the latest file.
Also contrary to what I have read, you have to run spd-conf as root and configure system wide settings if you use a console login as I do. Otherwise you will just get espeak on console login.
Best wishes to all,
David Ring, N1EA