Hass.io Snips.Ai "won't talk"

Hass.io image, HassOS 2.12
Home Assistant 0.94.4
Pi 3B v1.2
Snips.Ai 5.2
Mosquitto broker 4.3
USB headset via direct connection to Pi

Issue: Snips parses correctly, but won’t “talk”.

Installed the “assistant” per instructions on the
https://www.home-assistant.io/addons/snips/
And also:
https://docs.snips.ai/getting-started/quick-start-console

With-in Hass.io add-on details, below is the config. The webpage indicates something a little different, MQTT info, but when I make those changes the HA page fails to save them.
{
"assistant": "assistant.zip",
"language": "en",
"custom_tts": {
"active": false,
"platform": "amazon_polly"
}
}

Via the pc, I have placed \HASSIO\share\assistant.zip

When I say the key word “snips”, I hear the “listening tones” so headphones are working. In the log I see it correctly parsed what I said, but it is failing to actually play any voice audio. For testing I changed the intent file to simply say some text.

In the snips log within HA, I see a lot of repeating:
2019-06-20 15:32:14,876 INFO gave up: snips-analytics entered FATAL state, too many start retries too quickly
1561059153: Connecting bridge main-mqtt (core-mosquitto:1883)
1561059155: Socket error on client local.core-snips.main-mqtt, disconnecting.

This is the snips add-on log results from me saying “what is the weather”:
[15:34:06] [Nlu] detected intent searchWeatherForecast with confidence score 1.000 for input "what is the weather"
[15:34:06] [Dialogue] New intent detected searchWeatherForecast with confidence 1.000
1561059252: Connecting bridge main-mqtt (core-mosquitto:1883)
INFO:snips_dialogue_lib::coordinator::coordinator: Session [365f67b4-0067-4906-b7f2-b11cde576e18]: closing session which was active: Timeout
INFO:snips_dialogue_lib::coordinator::coordinator: Site [default]: reset site -> turn off ASR and turn on Hotword
[15:34:12] [Dialogue] session with id '365f67b4-0067-4906-b7f2-b11cde576e18' was ended on site default. The session was ended because one of the component didn't respond in a timely manner

Excerpt from \config\configuration.yaml
intent_script: !include intent_script.yaml
snips:

Contents of \config\intent_script.yaml
searchWeatherForecast:
speech:
type: plain
` text: ‘The weather is currently hot’``

Also on the monitor connected to the pi I see repeating non-stop:
[ "various-numbers" ] Transfer to device 6 endpoint 0x2 frame "various-numbers" failed - FIQ reported NYET. Data may have been lost.

I’m guessing I do not have something setup correctly with MQTT, but I have not been able to figure out what.
Thanks