2017-06-08 18:57:36 (edited by serrebi 2017-06-08 18:59:08)

I gave up. Just told them on Twitter my  feelings and use the unofficial addon. They really need to fix this. Lots of us want to support the synths we use, even if they are actually abandoned ware, we just don't want bullshit DRM. I got bit on the sapi engine, it's like why would I buy another license from these people for an NVDA addon to get screwed all over again? At least on Android, their scheme is more invisible of a deterrent than this license situation.

2017-06-08 18:58:23

Use the contact us form on their web site, that's how I got a response from them, though to be fair, my inquiry wasn't a request for tech support.

Since A T Guys are just resellers, there may be little they can do in regards to the activation server, but they might be able to help you get a response.

However, I think using the form on Code Factory's web site is preferable since it eliminates anyone having to play the middleman.

2017-06-08 19:36:40

flackers wrote:

Maybe CodeFactory don't respond because with every licence they sell they get a support ticket in return and they're sick of them.

and they are too brain dead to realize that debugging their sh*t would cost less time and money than answering all of the unnecessary support tickets from angry customers in the long run.
I don't mind AP systems which require an initial server connection to get activated in the first place... but I resent the hell out of systems that continue to require access to a license server after the fact. It's a real slap in the face to have paid good money for a software product only to have them imply that they still don't trust me.

Official server host for vgstorm.com and developer of the Manamon 2 netplay server.
PSA: sending unsolicited PMs or emails to people you don't know asking them to buy you stuff is disrespectful. You'll just be ignored, so don't waste your time.

2017-06-08 19:43:28

Since Eloquence is a Nuance product, I wonder if everybody with problems complained to Nuance, if they would tell the people at Code Factory to get off their lazy asses and help their customers or risk losing the right to sell Eloquence?

2017-06-08 20:38:16

Nuance wouldn't do a thing like that. Nuance used to care about end users long, long ago, but they've given all their shits and now are leaving us high and dry while companies are their customers. But no. They're the ones who told Code Factory to use drm in the first place. All Nuance cares about is hte licenses Code Factory buys from them, not what they sell to their customers. Any company with common sense would see that Eloquence, being really only popular among the blind community these days and longsince abandoned, and would open source it. The problem? Nuance hasn't had a brain for years. And even more of a problem? The fact that Eloquence has such a small userbase backfires on us, because they know they have the state agencies paying for screen readers and notetakers which, you guessed it, use eloquence, so there's their excuse to charge out the ass for royalties.

2017-06-08 21:09:42

Yeah, you're probably right.

OmniPage, Nuance's OCR program used to be a really great program, so when the people at the Lighthouse recommended that I use it with Microsoft Word to read my mail, I went and bought a copy. What a mistake!

Besides SSI Disability income, I also get a monthly benefit from the insurance company that provided the disability insurance my last employer offered as part of their benefits package. Every month they send the same letter breaking down my benefit payment in the exact same format every time. So you'd think that after scanning and OCR ing the resulting document would be the same each month. Nope! Every month OmniPage came up with some new difficult to decipher document!

After fighting with it for about nine months I gave up and downloaded VFO's Open Book for a trial. I was so happy with the consistent results it gave me that I eventually bought it, expensive beast that it is, but to me it was money far better spent than the money I paid for OmniPage.

Before I lost my vision I used PaperPort to manage all my documents. Then ScanSoft became Nuance and the next release of PaperPort was so crappy that I never activated it so I could return it as junk.

OmniPage and PaperPort were both ScanSoft products before ScanSoft became Nuance. I don't know the story behind the name change but I do know that most of ScanSoft's products have suffered a significant drop in quality once Nuance got a hold of them. Except for Eloquence, I wouldn't use a Nuance product unless you gave it to me at no cost, and even then only reluctantly. I'd drop Eloquence too if I could find a voice I like better, but so far that hasn't happened.

2017-06-08 22:30:11 (edited by flackers 2017-06-08 22:31:17)

Given how long it's been since it's been developed, it amazes me that eloquence is still the top of the tree in terms of consistent pronunciation and good rhythm at any speed. Especially now TTS is a mainstream feature of so many devices, you'd think those natural voices would have caught up by now.
Re CF's contact form: that's what I used the first two times, then discovered the help desk ticket submission page in an FAQ and thought that's what I'd been doing wrong. Neither form has resulted in a response. It must be the subject matter that's the problem. They must know this licensing system sucks and are burying their heads in the sand. What makes me laugh is they say on their FAQ that they don't give refunds because you get to try the software for 7 days, but the shitty DRM isn't part of the trial. If only I'd used a credit card or paypal, I'd definitely be pursuing a refund.

2017-06-08 23:00:00

And they didn't do their homework before picking Themita as their drm system o choice. It is only barely better than STarforce Protection, and by better I mean better for intrusive drm extremists. But it is intrusive in different ways, and in more ways than Starforce. The first version they released wasn't able to be installed on virtual machines due to the drm, requiring you to disable all instances of vmware anything via the config file, which resulted in massive vm crashes. They fixed that, but that drm system caused the problem. As for ocr, I have been very satisfied with KNFB Reader so would take any Kurzweil product any day. They've been the leader in ocr for a good long time.

2017-06-08 23:19:10

@flackers

When did you use the contact form? It took a bit more than 24 hours before I got a response

2017-06-08 23:53:32

The first message I sent was about VAT exemption prior to purchase and that was over a month ago. The first support question would have been a week and a half ago, and the support ticket followed a few days later. The support ticket system said they respond within 24 to 48 hours, but it's been 4 or 5 days now, and based on the lack of response to my other two messages, I doubt I'll be hearing anything. I think it might be the fact that a lot of companies don't respond to support enquiries that have been addressed in the FAQ or knowledge base. Maybe CF thinks their scant answer on the FAQ about having a good internet connection exempts them from addressing this issue properly.

2017-06-09 04:40:00

Seconded.
I wrote them on Sunday explaining that my activations had been used up, one due to hardware failure and the other two due to automatic updates.
It's now Thursday and I haven't heard.
I emailed ATGuys and they sent an email to CF copying me on it. Hopefully that gets their attention. Otherwise I'll have to see if there's any other contact info for this outfit and maybe send them snail mail.

Official server host for vgstorm.com and developer of the Manamon 2 netplay server.
PSA: sending unsolicited PMs or emails to people you don't know asking them to buy you stuff is disrespectful. You'll just be ignored, so don't waste your time.

2017-06-09 06:16:44

or maybe some developer should just take the eloquence from the NVDA addon and make an open source sapi5 eloquence out of it with no drm at all?

2017-06-09 10:05:04 (edited by david_solomon1 2017-06-09 10:12:52)

@Orko:

With the method used above using the system image, are your eloquence keys still working? I ask because mine seemed to be working fine, but when I got up this morning and tried using it, it's suddenly deactivated again. This time I did nothing, haven't even restarted my computer since I checked for activation. I don't think it's a very worth while option to have to recover from a system image every time I want to restore my eloquence activation for a couple of days, so was just wondering if you're having the same problem.

Thanks.

I haven't gotten any reply from code factory either. I can't even find their customer support ticket system or I'd try that too. I used the contact form and haven't heard anything back either. I think it was last week. Hopefully someone will have better luck getting ahold of them and letting them know there are customers with viable problems that actually need help.

2017-06-09 11:07:58

http://www.codefactory.cat/helpdesk/

2017-06-09 12:16:54

The thing is CF's eloquence doesn't seem to be the most responsive TTS engine in the world anyway. Having it set as the default SAPI voice makes the TTS options window a bit slow and crashy, and ditto NVDA.  I'm sorry I bought the thing. The upside of all this is I'll hopefully have a way of recovering my system without help, and thanks to this thread I went and got an eloquence addon for NVDA that works with the latest versions. Previously I had been copying eloquence files into synth drivers and that method only worked if you did it on an old version of NVDA then updated to the latest.

2017-06-09 12:50:12 (edited by david_solomon1 2017-06-09 12:50:51)

For anyone still having trouble, I found a method that seems to have worked. I got this from the email that came when I registered eloquence:

support (at) codefactoryglobal (dot) com

Apparently this email address is actually being monitored. When I sent in a request for help, I got a response within an hour. Naturally, spam prevention measures apply so modify the address as needed to turn it into an actual email.

They reset my keys without any trouble and everything works fine now.

2017-06-09 13:50:24 (edited by flackers 2017-06-09 13:53:40)

Thanks David. Just sent an email. Fingers crossed.
By the way, I checked the list in system restore and found that earlier the same day I lost an activation, Windows had installed a critical update so maybe that's the cause of the activation loss. I normally have updates disabled, but I installed Microsoft security essentials and that turned them on.

2017-06-09 16:53:59 (edited by Orko 2017-06-09 16:58:08)

Are any of you using the contact us link and fillinf out the contact us form instead of using the help desk system. I first tried using the help desk system and got nowhere, then earlier this week I tried using the contact us form and got a result the following day. I might have gotten a reply the same day except it was pretty late in the day when I used the form.

@david_solomon1

No, my current activation has been running for almost two years, and I do get updates from Microsoft. But not automatically, I get notified when updates are available, I then decide which updates I want and they are downloaded and installed at that time.

I also use MSE and the only updates it get automatically are to the definition files.

@joshknnd1982

Unless I'm mistaken, somebody tried that, but the result was that it crashed any program that used SAPI.

---

There are times, like this one, when I really wished I had taken the time to learn assembly language on the PC, as I did with the Apple 2. I got so good with the Apple 2 that there wasn't anything I couldn't remove the copy protection from. Those were the days, I have lots of fond memories from them.

2017-06-09 17:06:56

I have also achieved success by contacting atguys.com. They reached out to CF and got a key reset for me. I only use this for games, but I haven't seen many other viable options that are responsive enough for fluid gaming.

Orko wrote:

@joshknnd1982

Unless I'm mistaken, somebody tried that, but the result was that it crashed any program that used SAPI.

I wonder if that project still exists? There are probably just some bugs to be worked out to fix the crashyness.
Though I personally would want more than a SAPI voice, but rather something cross plat that I could take anywhere and just render the voice to a stream of bytes.

Official server host for vgstorm.com and developer of the Manamon 2 netplay server.
PSA: sending unsolicited PMs or emails to people you don't know asking them to buy you stuff is disrespectful. You'll just be ignored, so don't waste your time.

2017-06-09 20:36:38

@Orko

As I pointed out, I tried the contact form first because I couldn't find the customer support ticket. Then I tried filling out a customer support ticket when I did find it, and finally I submitted a request to the email I mentioned above and got my keys reset. Pretty sure a couple of others have said they've tried the contact form with no success as well.

2017-06-09 21:05:48

@david_solomon1

OK, by their messages, I couldn't tell what method they were using, I guess I missed it. It does seem kind of strange that whether you get a reply seems to be randomly hit or miss.

It's interesting that they are using Themedia for their DRM. I remember them from my time as a senior developer in the DRM industry. Other than that they were a competitor, I don't remember hearing much about them good or bad, except that they were expensive compared to the product I worked on, which unfortunately is now dead. In it's day it was quite popular and effective.

It used the old classic method of using your name and a matching key to unlock the software. No online checks or activation, unless the user of our software coded it themselves.

2017-06-09 21:08:52

re: sapi eloquence.
Yes it is a thing, a quite functional thing actually, since it's been recently modified. It even supports pitch and volume and rate changes. I just need to get in contact with the guy who's working on it and get him to implement a voice changing system of some sort, add a filter for backquote tags, and implement my growing set of regular expressions to prevent somebody from crashing it and... Fucking the sapi.
Re: NVDA eloquence.
This, is also a thing too. Hosted by the same guy who's doing the sapi4/5 one, and I have my own version. For just a normal user I'd just install his version, people can get annoyed with what I've done. I, per forum rules, cannot mention the name or hosting location of this individual, nor can I post the link to my modification to the NVDA version, as eloquence, due to code factory, is a maintained running piece of software that it would be pirating to do such actions. I don't respond to pm's so... If ya have to contact me, email me. That's all I'll say on the matter.

----------
An anomaly in the matrix. An error in existence. A being who cannot get inside the goddamn box! A.K.A. Me.

2017-06-09 21:58:05

Orko wrote:

@david_solomon1

OK, by their messages, I couldn't tell what method they were using, I guess I missed it. It does seem kind of strange that whether you get a reply seems to be randomly hit or miss.

It's interesting that they are using Themedia for their DRM. I remember them from my time as a senior developer in the DRM industry. Other than that they were a competitor, I don't remember hearing much about them good or bad, except that they were expensive compared to the product I worked on, which unfortunately is now dead. In it's day it was quite popular and effective.

It used the old classic method of using your name and a matching key to unlock the software. No online checks or activation, unless the user of our software coded it themselves.

@Orko, if you don't mind me asking, was it Software Passport/Armadillo that you worked on?

Official server host for vgstorm.com and developer of the Manamon 2 netplay server.
PSA: sending unsolicited PMs or emails to people you don't know asking them to buy you stuff is disrespectful. You'll just be ignored, so don't waste your time.

2017-06-09 22:09:43 (edited by jack 2017-06-09 22:10:15)

And that's how a drm system should be. Enough to get you started, and anything else you're on your own for. IT should be the drm system as a supplement to the product, as opposed to surrendering such product to the control of a drm system, as it were. Themedia as a dram system is definitely less invasive on your own system, i e, there are probably no rootkits in place to screw with your cd rom drivers as Starforce does, but rather it invades your ability to run the product since the dev decides to use persistent online authentication. Code Factory Eloquence is basically the Electronic Arts Spore/Securom crisis of 2008 all over again, without the widespread amount of public outcry and torrents.

2017-06-09 22:54:18 (edited by Orko 2017-06-09 22:58:52)

@Trajectory

No, I don't mind you asking, but unfortunately, non disclosure and non compete agreements were part of the employment agreement I signed when I took the job. They are probably all expired by now but I'd rather not take that chance and end up being sued, so I will not discuss who I worked for, what products I worked on, or anything else about my job other than what I have already said.

My apologies.