Problem with gnome-speech in FC4?

["Al Puzzuoli" <alpuzz comcast net>]

Hi everyone,

I have recently done clean installs of FC4 on two separate systems and on 
both I am experiencing issues with Gnome-speech and Festival.  Details are 
as follows:

I know that Festival itself works because I can activate it using brltty and 
when I do so, I hear speech.   I believe sound support is set up properly in 
gnome as well because I hear the test sound during firstboot.

I have run tests using the version of Gnome-speech that installs with FC4 as 
well as whichever version is in CVS as of august 2.

With the install version, test-speech can activate the Festival driver and 
seemingly runs all the tests; However it does so in complete silence.  If I 
run Gnopernicus, I get the same result-- Gnopernicus runs and shows that 
speech is enabled but again in reality, there is no speech.
I have also checked out gnome-speech from CVS and built it using 
"./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr"  However after installing this version, things 
seem to get worse.  Test-speech completely freezes when it attempts to 
activate the Festival driver and I am forced to break out with control+c.

If anyone has thoughts on how to troubleshoot this further, they would be 
much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

--Al