If even working around the drm of eloquence in the closest to legal way you can involves buying Code Factory's version of Eloquence, then using the sapi4 version with a bridge, then so be it. You know Nuance will get most of the undeserved cash, but Code Factory will get some, not sure how much they get out of the 70 bucks. We all worked around drm back in the old iTunes days, which of course was controversial, but the long and short of it is that drm blows, plain and simple. Every drm system I've seen has been extremely intrusive and provided no user control whatsoever. I have plenty of ideas for drm systems that would involve year-long license files, then after the year the program would redownload the file, and, even better, the program would come with a license manager to let you know when your license would expire and need to be redownloaded by the program, and all of that info would be stored locally. This way, in the event an of an unavoidable isp outage at the time of license redownload, you could make that trip over to the nearest restaurant or gas station with public wifi to get your license redownlloaded so there is no program outage. That would provide some transparency in the license control system, without being too intrusive. True, it could become potentially easier to break, but when has there ever been a truly unbreakable drm system? There hasn't. It's software, it can always be broken. And it places much more problems on genuine customers than pirates, so much that it's become a reason to crack software alone. Not because loss of respect, but because of the intrusive drm system.

@Dark

What's wrong, don't like having to look at the truth? I know what I saw, I saw a pirated copy of Pure Basic offered and accepted right here on these forums, and you ignored it with the comment that you couldn't see how anyone was being hurt by it. By your own actions, it appears that you turned a deaf ear to software piracy. How else could that be interpreted?

You may as well close this topic, by their postings, these people appear to be bound and determined to steal Eloquence and JAWS. and it appears that no amount of arguing will sway them. They keep coming up with invalid reasons they use to justify their theft.

@josh: Alright, just because this is a thread about Nuance doesn't mean we go talking about stealing this and that. Gene, no offense, but call my reasons invalid if you like. I've done tons of research on Nuance and know that they are nothing more than a competition slaughterer, just picking up where people left off, making nothing of their own originality. On the other hand, if they actually! made their own tts voice that is comparable to voices like Mac Alex, the Google Tts cloud voice, Amazon *ivona* Alexa, you name it, and it was their own original work, then yes, I'd have more respect for them. Until then, the point still stands that they are only abusing their power. As for the Pure Basic issue I can't speak for that as I missed out on that thread, but all I can say is I will neither agree nor disagree with Dark's comment as all I have is what was posted on this thread. Pure Basic, however, is an original work, that allows you to create both free and commercial applications, so making money off of a pirated copy is definitely very much illegal and also inethical as well. That doesn't mean cracking Nuance Vocalizer is legal, but Pure Basic is a language that, if I really thought I needed it, I'd most likely buy it, otherwise just stick with free languages. Same with Jaws, I don't use a cracked version, partyl because I do have a license, and also because I, well, just don't use it anymore, I use Nvda, which avoids cracking altogether. If Josh does things that make it necessary, the 40 minute demo should be fine, I used to do such a thing when I needed to OCR, just run the demo. As overpriced as Fs's software is, I can give them one thing, they did actually make it. So they do have some integrity to stand on as a software developer, and since Nuance hasn't completely made anything original from the ground up, just built upon existing work, they, in my honest opinion, have no integrity to stand on. While Nvda addons, for example, are adding on to an existing product, they are a different story, making those who write them most certainly software developers. Nvda is meant to be extendable, and Nvda addons can be major revolutions, think Nvda Remote, the soon to come Dictation Bridge, etc. They can also have an entire software dev team behind them, think Station Playlist Studio's extensive app module. See, there's originality right there. Nuance, on the other hand, has done none other than rip off existing code, and quite literally rip the Loquendo voices apart seeing as they have no universal expression, which was what made Loquendo a champion at the time. Oh wait, they probably have voice expression, it's just inside Vocalizer Studio which, of course, is only distributing to businesses! So, point made. I won't hold it against anyone if they buy Eloquence or any Nuance product, I'm simply making people aware of where the money is going, into the hands of a competition slaughterer, Code Factory and Nv Access only getting part of it, so much so that I'd rather just straight off donate to Nv Access because I'd have exact control of where the money is going, and to a good cause, no less.

OK, this is really off-topic, but it is about what Josh said in post 55. I don't understand how you could make food that tastes exactly like McDonald's food. Their food is known for containing a lot of artificial material, i.e. the buns that they use for their burgers, or they use preservatives, i.e. everything in the burger. This being considered, how could you make food that tastes exactly like McDonald's food? Perhaps you could make fries that taste similar, perhaps a thickshake, but I don't think you could make a burger that tastes exactly like it. However, I stand ready to be disproven. I don't need a complete recipe, just an idea of how you did it.

That's incredible. I would guess, though, that one you buy from a McDonald's restaurant would taste more "McDonalds'y", but I'm not planning on trying it to compare the two (I am not much of a fan for the Big Mac anyway).

@tjt1234: Nope, Ava's not Nuance's own voice. It's based on the Svox Grace voice. Svox was a company that made voices a while back. They didn't make desktop voices, only one that could run was the open source Pico of course. But they made voices for mobile devices and consumer electronics, especially in-car systems. Grace was one of the common voices used in gps and in-car systems, and if you had an android device, at the time these were some of the most recommended voices around, because they worked incredibly smoothly with Android 2.2/2.3 Froyo Gingerbread. Unfortunately, Svox was acquired by, you guessed it, Nuance. Worse yet, unlike Loquendo,  either they never got the chance, or they purposely forgot to pull their voices from the play store. Wasn't a problem in Ice Cream Sandwitch they were still alright. Later versions of Jellybean is when they really started to crash. And here's one to top that, they worked better on some devices than others! For example, I purchased Grace a while back and she worked fine on my Nexus running Kitkat, despite a few occasional engine reinitializations that, although slightly annoying, did not leave me without speech. It all went well up until Marshmallow, when Svox would enter an infinite crash loop. Every time I even so much as gestured to try to switch back to a working tts: Unfortunately, Svox Classic tts has stopped. No way out of it other than suspending Talkback and tapping around for luck, hoping the estimation was right as to where Google Tts was, the only engine that I had that didn't have the 3rd party warning. So these voices are left in the Play Store, unupdated, still available for purchase. Thankfully, there is a two week trial for each voice, so new device owners can thoroughly test the voices to make sure they work before buying the voices, which still are reasonably priced, because for a time, they did work. Of course, with Svox in Nuance's hands, they updated the voice, gave Grace a voice-lift, and renamed her Ava. And don't get me wrong, Ava does sound good! But it was not! their own creation, just like everything else they've done.

Good luck getting it from Microsoft. Nuance may not even do it either. You never know though.

Alright, well in that case ,they can go take Themida and shove it. I'll betcha Nuance forced them to have that drm system. Damn it Nuance! I'm sure they're too blinded by the billions of dollars that that arrive in their waiting hands, to realize that a lot of the Vocalizer for Nvda source code is readable, hint hint. Since Nvda is distributed under Gnu Gpl, you can't completely close source an addon. That was clearly discussed in the blog post explaining why Leasey for Nvda isn't planned. This goes out to anyone considering buying a product made by Nuance, I would seriously think twice about what you're getting yourself into. Especially with the sapi5 Eloquence and Vocalizer, considering the drm. I don't care what system is used, drm should not! be placed on a speech synthesizer. Just like music files can be rendered unplayable in the event of a lost license key, a system could be rendered speechless all because of the bloody drm. In-frickin-credible!

Leasey is a comprehensive set of utilities for Jaws. Things that made using the computer easier. It is a menu-based overlay to the computer. The bundle even includes a games module that has a lot of games, some made exclusively for Leasey. I believe I remember a possible plan to make the games module a stand-alone component but I'm not sure as of yet. There can be no Leasey for nvda, at least not in the form of an nvda addon, because they cannot close source an addon. And since Leasey is a commercial product, open sourcing is certainly not part of the plan. And since Nvda itself is open source, addons cannot be closed source.

Firstly, @Josh: I do agree with Gene, that comparison wasn't a valid one. While branded food is trademarked, reproduced food isn't always an exact version of the food, and you did have to work to reproduce it, so no, it's not quite the same. Gene: You are right that not all of it is Nuance's fault, but get a load of this. It may not be all Nuance's fault, since after all the companies in question did have to accept the acquisitions, but some of these acquisitions were bitter at best, leading to the companies kind of being pushed into accepting the acquisition. Like this one, Where Nuance acquires ZI Corporation, taken straight from an article from Speech Technology Magazine:
"NuanceCommunications this week completed its $35 million acquisition of Zi Corp. and will incorporate Zi's mobile search technology into its suite of services.
This ends a sometimes-bitter acquisition process that began last August when Nuance offered twice the trading value of Zi's stock price. Zi resisted the offer, which led to a hostile takeover bid, as well as a patent lawsuit. The deal was eventually consummated for about $17 million in cash and $18 million in stock, and Zi's management encouraged stockholders to approve the deal." See, through manipulation, the corporation was eventually driven to believe that it was in their best interests to let Nuance swallow them whole, incorporating the technology into their own products.

Lol, that's exactly where I'm getting at! Drm blows! Especially when used with a speech engine! Like I said before, you guys wanna buy Eloquence then wait for a sapi4-sapi5 bridge and use that, thus avoiding the drm, that's fine as well I guess. Hey, you bought it, and if just to pay the money, I personally don't see a problem. It's pretty much the equivalent of what had to be done with ITunes music back before 2009. And the secret to most, if not all, of those drm removal tools for iTunes, is that they stayed as close to legal as possible, all looking for a matching pair of license keys for the song and the master key that you bought, i e, the programs knew what was a legit song and what wasn't, so people still bought the music from iTunes, then broke free from the drm. So, if Nuance makes text to speech voices that are defective by design, and requires other companies to do the same, fair enough. Taring down that wall of drm is necessary if we don't want to lose speech because of some paranoid license check system. And before anyone says otherwise, I do mean Defective by Design. Any company that makes software or services that do have users bound to extreme intrusive drm systems, is demed by the Free Software Foundation whom I fully support, as Defective by Design. Especially! the one used by Eloquence sapi5 and Vocalizer sapi 5 that doesn't even allow you to see your remaining licenses without contacting Code Factory, whom of course will say "Well we did warn ya about..." yeah yeah, we get it. Nuance made them put in a strong drm system, and this is how it's dealt with. I'm know I may be coming across as harsh, but I am simply fed up with this ultra-intrusive drm placed on speech synths, thereby making them defective by design.

Lol! That would actually be a pretty fun encounter on the end of a person who's lost their license, at least they'd get a good laugh out of it!