I won't have speak with animals either as I'll be playing either a Warlock or a Sorcerer and I don't believe either of those classes can have speak with animals. It would be a nice to have and I don't know if a companion having it counts but it's more important for me to have a charisma based character because I want to go all in on a character that is very good at speech checks.
Warlock does have beast speech which you can pick as an invocation at level 2.
