Making Festival and Asterisk happy?

[drclue]

OK, on my computer , it's not particularly practical
to use a PIAF ISO , so I've been having to roll my own
installation so that Asterisk can live happily in my development
environment.

I've got asterisk installed , phones working , my FastAGI
PHP daemon working and all that.

Now I'm turning my attentions to Festival text2speach
I have Festival working and I can get both it's CLI and the shell
to talk.

I have added configuration to festival.scm and played with that some with the following being the latest added entries

;;; Command for Asterisk begin
;(define (tts_textasterisk string mode)
;"(tts_textasterisk STRING MODE)
;Apply tts to STRING. This function is specifically designed for
;use in server mode so a single function call may synthesize the string.
;This function name may be added to the server safe functions."
;(let ((wholeutt (utt.synth (eval (list 'Utterance 'Text string)))))
;(utt.wave.resample wholeutt 8000)
;(utt.wave.rescale wholeutt 5)
;(utt.send.wave.client wholeutt)))

;;; Command for Asterisk end
 

;;; Command for Asterisk begin
(define (tts_textasterisk string mode)
"(tts_textasterisk STRING MODE)
Apply tts to STRING. This function is specifically designed for
use in server mode so a single function call may synthesize the string.
This function name may be added to the server safe functions."
(utt.send.wave.client (utt.wave.resample (utt.wave.rescale (utt.synth
(eval (list 'Utterance 'Text string))) 5) 8000)))
;;; /Command for Asterisk end




;;; Command for Shell commands using voice.

;(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay plug:dmix -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay  -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'snd)

;;; /Command for Shell commands using voice.

all I get in Asterisk CLI are messages saying the call to
Festival was made and that same returned non-zero while in
festival I can see connect/disconnect messages for the request
from Asterisk.

No speech ever makes it to the phone (Twinkle SIP softphone)

So anyways , I figure I must be missing something
but I'm not sure what. Any clues would be appreciated.

Most times I use the text2speech simply as an aid
while debugging the PHP scripts I load via FastAGI
but currently I'm just using Festival in the dialplan , and I'm not getting anywhere, which brings me here.