No, speech-dispatcher hasn't been forked as far as I know; I certainly
haven't done it yet.

The inclusion of the debian-pulseaudio-config-override package in
Beowulf and beyond raises a problem. Forking speech-dispatcher relies
on pulseaudio being disabled by default. Uninstalling pulseaudio isn't
possible in every case, since at least xfce, and perhaps other
desktops seem to have a hard dependency on it. If speech-dispatcher
was forked with the changes I proposed, and pulseaudio was enabled as
the debian-pulseaudio-config-override package does, users would have
no speech in the GUI or the text console, making the problem worse.

The possible solutions I can think of are:

1. Don't install debian-pulseaudio-config-override by default, and
fork speech-dispatcher with the changes I proposed.

2. Remove the hard dependency on pulseaudio from xfce and other
desktops, and fork speech-dispatcher with the changes I proposed.

3. Don't fork speech-dispatcher, close this bug, and leave users who
do a new install with speech at the text console, but not in the
GUI by default until they manually resolve the situation, as is the
case in debian right now.

Greg