speechd and software dectalk?

[Jacob Schmude]

Hi everyone
My name is Jacob Schmude and I'm a recent user of speechd. My primary use is to 
use speechd and speechd_up to communicate with the speakup screen 
reader. It works, but I'd like to get better speech quality. Flite just doesn't 
sound great, and festival isn't too responsive.
Has anyone gotten speechd to communicate with software dectalk? I'm attempting 
to utilize the sd_generic driver to attempt to communicate with the dectalk's 
say program, but I'm not having much luck. I've got the command right, since 
when I enter the command on the command line it speaks, but when in speechd it 
doesn't work.
The last message I get from the debug output is:
speaking thread started...
and that's it. Obviously, something's not right,  since the debugging output 
for the flite module returns much more than that... and it doesn't speak.
Has anyone successfully done this? If so, how?

P.S. If this isn't the right place for this discussion, please point me in the 
right direction.