Post #4458931

FlexVoice 3.01 shipped in 2002–2003 into a company whose lead speech-industry investor had just been destroyed in one of Europe's largest accounting frauds — taking the entire Flanders Language Valley funding ecosystem with it, and thousands of small Belgian investors besides. Meanwhile everything L&H had swallowed, Dragon and Dictaphone included, consolidated into Nuance. A small elegant engine from San Jose had nowhere left to sell. Truly sad, really. The product didn't fail — its ecosystem did, and the timing was almost cruel: it was finished right as the ground went out. The rest fits József's account exactly. Look who's left standing on that investor list: Creative Technology, GIC (Singapore's sovereign wealth fund), InnoMedia, Institute for Infocomm Research — all Singapore. When Mindmaker wound down, the technology went to the surviving investors. FlexVoice wasn't abandoned because it wasn't good enough. It was orphaned by a fraud in Belgium — and twenty-three years later its author is still improving it, by email, because he cared about the technology. One of the stranger tales of text to speech I've heard if there ever was one.