If this goes through, Microsoft could do something positive with some tech that Nuance owns that probably isn't making much money anymore anyway. One of the text-to-speech (speech synthesis) engines that Nuance got from its various acquisitions is called ETI-Eloquence. It does pure speech synthesis, not concatenation of pre-recorded human speech like most modern TTS engines. So it's particularly popular among blind power-users because it can speak very fast while still being quite intelligible. At the same time, it doesn't hold much if any appeal for mainstream applications. But the codebase has been abandoned for a while. So it would be awesome if Microsoft would open-source ETI-Eloquence. Hey, I can dream.