A random crash string that worked in the British English version of
Eloquence 4: ironasap. This one is interesting. ASAP itself was added to
Eloquence in 1999. For US English, it's pronounced as a-sap, but for
British English, it says each letter individually. However, it does this
using an entry in the internal roots dictionary which has multiple stress
markers. The SPR is `[.2e.2E.2se.1pi]. It seems that the bug is that if a dictionary entry contains an SPR that has multiple stress marks, and certain known word prefixes are used, the synth crashes. For ASAP, apart from iron, other known prefixes I've found to work are cyber and body. I wanted to see if this worked in the user roots dictionary by adding the SPR for IBM's powerpc dictionary entry, which has multiple primary stress marks. Ironpowerpc didn't crash, but the iron prefix got stripped out, though the SPR for powerpc was still modified to fit with the addition of the iron prefix, which means Power PC ended up sounding more like power pissy instead. This bug was fixed in Eloquence 5, so typing ironasap in the British English version of Eloquence today just results in a weird stress pattern, with the ern part of iron getting primary stress. #EloquenceResearchCommentary

Prior to around March 1997, ETI didn't have a website. However, the domain existed at least as far back as December 1996, and was briefly the home of Ithaca Guitar Works. https://web.archive.org/web/19961227210037/eloq.com/. The Ithaca Guitar Works site is well-archived, even including audio and video samples of some of the instruments they were selling at the time. Here's a sample of the mandolect. https://web.archive.org/web/19970203141736/http://eloq.com/wav/mando.wav. The last capture where the domain was hosting Ithaca Guitar Works was February 1997. https://web.archive.org/web/19970203141717/http://eloq.com:80/. The next capture was made in April 1997, and the domain had switched to ETI at that point. https://web.archive.org/web/19970412190013/http://eloq.com:80/. Since Ithaca Guitar Works and ETI were in the same city, I'm wondering if ETI gave Ithaca Guitar Works permission to use their domain while they were setting up their own site.
Ithaca Guitar Works still exists today. https://www.guitarworks.com/. #EloquenceResearchCommentary

RealPlayer. A media player written in the 90s, significant enough to be added to the 3,518 words the Japanese Eloquence won't spell out, as well as the German IBMTTS in version 6.4.1.0. Neither Eloquence or IBMTTS added it to English, though, so the letter to sound rules assume that the root word is alplay, with "re" as the prefix, and "er" as the suffix. There's some support for mixed case words, example: LargeBoulder, but even that doesn't catch it. #EloquenceResearchCommentary

On some products that used Eloquence, such as the BrailleNote from HumanWare or the PAC Mate from Freedom Scientific, there's a strange arrangement of libraries. The US English library, enu.syn, is running Eloquence 6.0, while all other languages are at 6.1. This isn't exclusive to just these products. I've seen a similar thing with COBRA, an old German screen reader. All languages are at version 6.1, except for US English which is at 5.0.1.8. I wonder if this was done for performance reasons or to save on licensing costs. #EloquenceResearchCommentary

An 1996 article from The New York Times about Everybody can Read, a program by Lew Robins that was designed to teach children to read and used Eloquence. Also contains some early audio samples of the synth. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/0926read.html
#EloquenceResearchCommentary

So Eloquence's maximum pitch is 422 Hz? The Korean version sincerely begs to differ... You might want to turn your volume down or wear headphones for this. This is the result of setting the pitch and inflection settings to their maximum, holding down the i key for several seconds, and then adding an exclamation mark. The Korean version of IBMTTS, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, fixed or didn't get this, but still screams a bit. #EloquenceResearchCommentary

Funny how IBM added the pronunciation of Enron to IBMTTS around February 2003, about a year or so after the company collapsed in spectacular fashion. They also fixed Aptiva, the name of a line of computers they produced, the pronunciation of which had been broken since 2000, about a year after they discontinued them. #EloquenceResearchCommentary