I don't think flite on its own will be of much use to you, for the following reasons:

1) In order to play speech while the player is running, you need a flite binary that takes advantage of Hijack's sound overlay functionality.
2) The empeg's sound device only accepts 44 kHz samples, and flite doesn't give you that kind of quality. So you need some sample rate conversion of the sound before it goes to the sound device.

Lucky for you, this problem has been tackled before, partly by myself, but mostly by Josh Harding, who released ttsd. It includes a flite binary that takes care of these two problems. It also allows you to create a device that you can just echo text to and have it spoken by flite. There's a bit of a delay, and flite's memory footprint is a little harsh, but it worked adequately for me when I was playing around with it a while ago. This is probably your best bet for seeing if the roadmap announcements work.

Josh doesn't frequent the BBS much (at all?) anymore, and as far as I know gave up on ttsd... But if you can't get things working, I should be able to help out.