Mycroft.AI recommends using Pulse Audio for audio inputs and outputs. This can be installed using:
sudo apt install pulseaudio
Once you've plugged in your hardware you can configure the default devices for input and output so that they will be selected on next reboot.
We can find the output devices using the pulse audio command line tool. This is quite verbose we can filter the output using grep.
pacmd list-sinks | egrep "name:|index"
A similar command can then be used to check the for input devices
pacmd list-sources | egrep "name:|index"
Once you've identified these you can test them using the set default command with the index number of the device you think is the right one.
pacmd set-default-sink 1
The output can be tested using the speaker test command with the number of output channels. In my case 2.
speaker-test -t wav -c 2
And once that's working you can test the input using
arecord test.wav
followed by
aplay test.wav
Finally you can set these as defaults by editing the configuration file
sudo nano /etc/pulse/default.pa
You'll need to use the full name so these are properly detected. Reboot the machine to test.