Yes, I had discovered that too when I was playing around. Setting the espeak parameters manually helped. Of course, having the option in the GUI is much better, thanks for that. The only thing, the espeak help says that the maximul volume is 200; I am not sure how valid settings beyond that are, I have not tested it yet

Unfortunately, it seems that something has broken as a side effect of this change. Leaving the sound settings at "automatic" works fine, but switching to "manual" makes two lots of "edit espeak options" and "reset to defaults" appear and, more importantly, it makes the sound disappear. I can of course leave it at automatic but I was fiddling with the options to try to make it mole legible.