Nuance also does other things outside of making TTS voices. I'm pretty sure that they play a decent role in the Speech to Text industry as well as a few other things that I've heard they did but don't currently remember. Maybe someone here can remind me, and also share for those who don't know?

Hi.
Will this mean that apple devices won't be able to use vocalizer anymore? I've switched to the Siri voices anyway, it's time for apple to add more breathing voices like Alex for all languages and to produce their own. Don't you think?

@MatthewSmithYT: Just because Microsoft didn't buy Nuance specifically for tts, doesn't mean they're stupid enough to not realize the huge international language portfolio they now have access to. That is something no other company has managed to top, and Apple has a long way to go. Nuance/Scansoft did not grow their portfolio overnight. Remember, any IVR service being used does need to be rounded out with tts, and Microsoft will want to make this a global effort. So the voices are no doubt going to be used in some way, even if not for the consumer. That being said, they aren't going to change what isn't broken either, so I'm pretty sure Vocalizer voices aren't leaving ios any time soon.

Apple license them. Code factory license them. Neither of these will be going away any time soon.

Apple have yet to update their license with Nuance, so that may be why. I imagine if Apple is trying to round out their international offering, and if they succeed, then Vocalizer may be leaving iOS soon. Given their speed with that, I'd say it probably own't happen within this decade.

Hmmm, this is an interesting development. It would be interesting to get much improved speech recognition in Windows 10, and built-in Vocalizer TTS would be badass! As for Apple dropping Vocalizer, that might happen once they expand their Siri voices. Are they developed exclusively by Apple? How about the old versions that were introduced in 2013? If Vocalizer is dropped from iOS, what happens to the older versions of the OS that still have it? As for Eloquence, who cares. That synthesizer should have died a long time ago. It's outdated and I suspect the only reason they still hang on to the licensing fees is because they can milk as much money as possible out of businesses like Vispero.

I don't expect major changes in Vocalizer licensing. Lots of companies use those voices, so disrupting that market would piss a lot of people off.

As for OCR, didn't that division of Nuance get sold to another company? If this is correct, Microsoft doesn't own Omnipage?

I do not agree, many of us grew up on it and I don't see the point in change for the sake of change. I do not like natural voices because I cannot speed them up and understand them as easily. Take away my eloquence and my productivity is dead for at least several months while I get used to something else. I will do almost anything to keep Eloquence whether that mean not updating to a new NVDA version, not updating to a new Windows version if for some reason it broke, etc.

Fair enough, if you love Dectalk that much, that's fine. It's unfortunate that nobody has updated it for NVDA 2019.3, but I think that is because Dectalk just doesn't have the overwelming popular support that Eloquence does. Even to this day, Eloquence is so popular that it's still getting new code written utilizing it, see Datajake's SAPI5 thing.

I'm in the eSpeak camp when it comes to computer-generated voices, though I can only tolerate the NVDA variant due to the increased inflection. Eloquence has always given me a headache and since it's not supported or actively maintained to my knowledge, it should either be made open source or just discontinued. It's really only useful on Windows and Linux, since there's apparently no interest by Code Factory to port it to ARM64. Then again, I didn't grow up using it so I don't really care, but I get why people cling to it. Humans don't like change.

All this might not come to pass. Maybe Microsoft will continue receiving royalties on a technology that hasn't been updated since 2002. I'm speculating here.

Personally, I find the Quincy ESpeak voice pleasant to the ears. I had to adjust the pitch a little bit because it was too high for me, but it works well. Eloquence tends to give me a headache after a while, so I can no longer use it comfortably.
Nevertheless, the default ESpeak voice is grading on the ears. If people can't find a good voice to stick to that is comfortable for them, or if people don't give recommendations at the very least, they're not going to be bothered to look. There are tuns of ESpeak variants, and not everyone has the time or patient's to dig through all of them. Eloquence ships with a decent voice right off the bat, and people have gotten used to its sound over the past 2 decades. You can't reasonably expect people to switch voices unless you point them to a specific voice or give a really good incentive to switch.

As I remembered Microsoft purchased Nuance for their speech recognition software.
I don't know if this happened but unfortunately the Vocalizer voices will not go at windows, since th e tts infrrastructure has? been spinned of to a company called Cerence, however I'm wrong.