flite text-to-speech not producing audio output

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How to get flite text-to-speech utility play audio on Fedora 25? I try running it like this:

flite -t "blah blah"

but no audio is heard. If I pass the -l option (loop audio), then open the sound mixer, I see ALSA plug-in [flite] under the 'Applications' tab...but no audio output!

I can get flite to output a wav file then play that back, but I'd prefer it played directly.