How to use the mbrola voices with speech-dispatcher and Orca
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Speech-dispatcher includes a generic module that allows to start various
speech engines, providing them the information they need to work, like
the voice and various settings: rate, pitch punctuation characters to
say, and last but not least the text to be spoken:

The settings used with the espeak-ng speech engine using the mbrola
voices are recorded in this file:
/etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/espeak-ng-mbrola-generic.conf.

The translation of espeak-ng phonemes in mbrola phonemes is provided in
Slint in /usr/doc/espeak-ng-1.49.2/mbrola.html
and more details are available from the website:
https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng

To check that a voice is usable, issue this command:
espeak-ng -v mb-<voice> "<text to be spoken>"
For instance:
espeak-ng -v mb-fr1 "Slint est un système dérivé de Slackware, \
polyglotte et accessible aux déficients visuels"

Thse possible output are self explanatory:
Error: Could not load the specified mbrola voice file.
Error: The specified espeak-ng voice does not exist.

There can be issues with the translation of some phonemes, as indicated
in the output, depending on the text to be spoken.

Notes: as of Friday 5 October 2018 the only mbrola voices not yet
supported by espeak-ng's phonemes translation to mbrola are:
bz1: Breton Female (25.0Mb)    Jean Pierre Messager
hb1: Hebrew Male (3.4Mb)    Yoram Meron
hb2: Hebrew Female (5.6Mb)    Esther Raizen
hn1: Korean Male (9.9Mb)    Kyongsok Gim

nl1 has very limited set of diphones and is usable only for reading
numbers.

Links:
http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html Main website
Lateste developments on GitHub
https://github.com/mbrola/mbrola-voices
https://github.com/mbrola/mbrola-bin