(Sorry for the late reply, I was on holiday)
For the 2.0 release, I had to change the sound system, because that version had quite some serious bugs.
The current 2.0 sound system does noh have good support for unicode, which is why you see this.
However, since 2.0 has been released, there also has been a new release of the 2.0-betas sound system, so hopefully, I can reinstate it.
As for TTS, vote for it on our feature request site.
Cheers,
Peter