Hello.
I have Festival installed, but if I try to get it to say anything, I get the following error.
[b]FreeBSD: can't open /dev/dsp[/b]
I’ve searched this, and have found that some process is probably hogging the device. So, run fstat | grep dsp, but nothing shows.
Any clue as to what I can do here?
As this thread has had so many views, but no replies, I thought it duty to post this. There must be people out there with a similar or same problem.
I won’t claim to know fully why this worked, but, I commented out the line…
noload => chan_alsa.so
… in modules.conf, and Festival now works within Asterisk.
I still cannot use Festival as a standalone, I get the same error, but, I don’t really have an intention to do that anyway 
Lack of a sound card (an old work machine with no need for sound) seems to be the issue.