Hi Charles, Perhaps, but its just another way to attempt to get the customer to pay for the same product over and over again. You buy Jaws the price of Eloquence is included in the sale. If you buy Openbook that too has another license for Eloquence meaning you just purchased the same sinth twice. If you go and buy the speech enabled version of Magic you just paid for the sinth for a third time.I think Speech Works is making quite a lot of money on that speech engine, because state agencies are all too happy to buy Jaws, Openbook, Magic, etc for their clients and pay for the same speech engine over and over again. Not that they really have a choice. Freedom Scientific, GW Micro, etc include the cost of the license for the voices as part of the sale so everyone ends up paying for it weather they want to or not. So I don't think they are losing any money or sleep over their end user license.
Plus when you get down to it Speech Works happens to have a product that is well liked. A lot of people I know agree with me that the voices for Eloquence aren't that great, but they love the low memory footprint, the fact it is fast and responsive, and it usually is pretty clear when it is speeded up. So even if GW Micro, Freedom Scientific, etc offered a version of their products without Eloquence I'm not sure people would go for it since the RealSpeak Direct voices, for example, sound better but are a lot more sluggish for day to day use. So many customers might end up willing to pay a little extra for Eloquence anyway regardless of the user license. I myself am on a tight budget so my wife and I have cut way back on spending. Especially, in the matter of software. Now that NVDA is out, has become fairly decent, I've gotten use to using that for day to day work rather than blowing a few hundred on SMA agreements for Jaws or Window-Eyes. Frankly I can't afford it any more, and I'm not sorry to give up Eloquence myself. For me its not worth it to continue feeding companies like Speech Works money to maintain their proprietary licenses, because its not fair to me or anyone else to continue paying for the same software over and over again. Cheers! On 11/12/11, Charles Rivard <[email protected]> wrote: > Makes sense, and they are screwing themselves, aren't they? They would sell > more if they were more flexible, I would think. > > --- > Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, > you! are! finished! --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
