"I am not getting any sound and the speaker icon is grayed out when I open the Italian phrase book."

This problem is caused by mismatched rights for the sound database file. Luckily, there is an easy solution to this problem!

Solution 1:
If you have a program like File Explorer you can find the file
/opt/Qtopia/bdicty/voice/SndItaPhr.pdb and change the permissions, to - read by owner, read by group, read by others.

Solution 2:
If you do not have such a program installed, please start the embedded console and write there:

su
cd /opt/Qtopia/bdicty/voice
chmod 755 SndItaPhr.pdb