Comment 32 for bug 354522

This is not a bug-fix, but is a simple solution for some cases. You can try this:

$ espeak --stdout "Hello, World" | aplay

It works fine for me and there is not need to compile or install. Whit -f (man espeak) you can read from files.

The magic here is "--stdout" and "| aplay".
Fom espeak man page:
" --stdout
              Write speech output to stdout"
From bash man page
"Pipelines
       A pipeline is a sequence of one or more commands separated by the character |"

HTH