Long pauses between sentences

[tarsobcaldas]

I'm not sure if it's a speech dispatcher problem or if it's something with the configuration, but when I run the following command, I get fairly short pauses between sentences, but when I run the phrase with spd-say, the pauses become very long, disrupting the flow of the reading.

echo "Then I realized that far from being lost, the details of these beers \
had been carefully stored in archives and brewery store rooms across Britain. \
Discovering the secrets of these lost beers was a possibility. All that was \ 
required was a bit of effort and determination."  | \
piper -m /home/noaxp/.var/app/com.mikeasoft.pied/data/pied/models/en_US-lessac-high.onnx \
--output_raw  | aplay -r 22050 -f S16_LE -t raw -

I've tried changing the configuration file piper.conf to include the flag --sentence_silence, but it doesn't seem to have any effect whatsoever, not to make it shorter or longer.

Still haven't checked how it's working with other output modules.