Ok just had another revelation though I haven't got a chance to test it yet. All we need for "tts" is a script like this:
flite -t $1 stdout

This should call flite with a specifically set text string and output straight to the Empeg's audio (because of the code changes ttsd's creator did to flite). Then we can get rid of ttsd altogether.. ttsd is basically a shell script that sleeps for a second and calls flite over and over- thus it introduces a big delay outputting speech and a big performance hit calling flite over and over again. If we can get this direct calling method to work the empeg just might have enough cpu to do this...