I dont know much about this program or what this ver of linux on the empeg can do. But after doing my first install of gentoo on a pc i ran across this thread in thier forums.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=44542
basicly its a speechd program that can make your pc speak. you echo stuff to /dev/speech according to the thread. I havent tried this yet, but just getting my empeg i thought it would be great to somehow have this on it, so i could have it say things on boot, or even at end of playlist, all kinds of diffent things. Now it may not be possible or at least easily possible, and I my self will probobly never figure it out, but thought it was a cool idea and would share it and see if anyone else have tried similar things. Thanks!

Search the bbs for "ttsd"

Oh cool... Thanks!

I have searched thru found it and even installed it, but one thing was there ever a solution found for the volume spike after ttsd plays? Ive read thru but was unable to locate anything. Didnt know if with some patches you all got rid of it or not. Im using v1.0a3

No idea whether the volume spike was solved or not. I haven't used ttsd in awhile and my programming plate is too full right now to take a look at it.

ok was just checking thanks

Alright! I have got my player on boot to print a lil popup saying:
Hello...
And have ttsd say the same thing the same time..
Now if i could only figure out how to change the voice and how to issue a change volume up and down from my script id be set..