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When your custom user fails to play the audio, are you also logged to the system as the pi user? audio group is tricky, it allows users in that group to get exclusive access to audio HW, preventing other users from using it:
Adding users to the audio group allows direct access to devices. Keep in mind, that this allows applications to exclusively reserve ...
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Try amixer:
amixer sset 'Capture' cap
amixer sset 'Capture' nocap
You may have to find out the control name for the microphone in your setup if you use additional hardware. amixer scontrols will list the controls you have.
There's also pactl command which should work on PulseAudio level. Identify the mic in the output of pactl list sources and then mute / ...
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Caveat: I know nothing about aplay or espeak. However, I can sometimes read & comprehend a man page. Simon's answer may be generally correct in that your "other-user" needs to be added to the group audio, but I don't believe you can add a user to a group with the command he's given: sudo useradd -G audio. To be completely fair, group and user ...
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I see you have created a new user, sgl. This user must be in the audio group to use audio devices with only a remote login. Furthermore, you may have to remove the pi user from that group, as having several users with exclusive access to audio hardware can create conflicts.
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You're asking some interesting questions (IMHO), but you're not likely to get the best answers here because your question is somewhat "off topic". Understand that just because Raspberry Pi can be applied to some computing task, does not make questions about that task relevant here. As a ludicrous example, consider the fiendish plan by one of our ...
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If you are building voice assistant, instead of muting microphone. I suggest to disable / enable the wake word listener. If you are using MyCroft, then MyPrecise is the work word listener which you can disable and enable when required
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