The very first overseas (i.e. not created in Japan) UTAU voicebank was Tomero Chii, introduced in December 2008. He was created and voiced by Chii, who is now the president of VocaTone, the company that created OLIVER and YOHIOloid.

(Tomero Chii image source: UTAU Wiki)

(source: UTAU Wiki, griss0mg on Twitter)

Why is this in my GIFs section

i mean.. for good reason tbh .. when the little guy is singing nothing else matters 🙏🙏 besides maybe.. his brother .. and kind of siblings ( ruby, audine, aurum :3)

Quick we need to Organize some kinda Iroha/yuki v6

Collab event to manifest their updates as well 8D (well Ollie’s bday is coming up and there is a collab for him and vocatone also has an official tumblr so maybe they’ll see and consider finding a new va for him or

Try to make one based on previous recordings lol)

An Iroha and a Yuki collab would be awesome! It would be neat to see someone put that together :3

Im pretty sure I saw Kyounosuke Yoshitate on twitter express interest in re-recording for a new iroha vb! So it's totally possible!

And considering Kiyoteru is getting a synthv vb I'd be surprised if Yuki didn't also eventually get one. Didn't she get a new voice provider for her V4 vb anyways since her V2 one had become an adult at that point? So I don't see why they couldn't do that again!

As for Oliver...man 😭 I hope so! We're in a golden age of English voice synths rn and I want SO BADLY to see engloids like Oliver, Ruby and Sonika to get some kind of justice through synthv 😭

Other than still making sales I don’t think zerog is iterated in updating /still focusing on Etherea or whatever it’s called tho be nice if they can just give some licensing if not full rights and still just get royalty or whatever lol

i mean listening to the soundbites on the site it doesnt seem to be anything similar to vocaloid, but i also dont know how much time and money is being put into Etherea, so if their hands are full with that i can understand not wanting to collab.

plus theres also depending on whether or not if the voicebank's providers are down for it or not, i know dex's at least isnt comfortable with the idea of AI, tho im unsure if his opinion extends to AI vocal synths like maghnites are.

they could always try getting a new provider like vocatone's doing with Oliver, but that's risky. Oliver sounds fine yet somehow theres people still insisting it doesnt sound like him(which is insane tbh). plus they got lucky with oli as i've heard they got his new voice from a fan that can do a decent impression? not sure how true that is tho

regardless im glad we're at least getting oliver and possibly big al/sweet ann/ruby as maghnites, if we're able to get other vocaloids or other synths in general on there, thats just a bonus. theres lots of new faces to look forward to as well!

Think it’ll be successful bc vocatone had a bit of notoriety and using Oliver’s name (and I think

That one vtuber guest was circus’ persona lol) so it’s prolly worth willing for ppl to “invest”/take a chance on it compared to a completely new unknown company starting from scratch tho no one expected synthV it go as viral as it did , so I think it’ll be more successful Than Emvoice but not as much as SynthV unless they get a ton of voice variety and handful of western composers to do a demo song or so

Tho if they’re able to instead of competing be nice for a collaborative effort to also get a version with them on SynthV /cevio /etc if they claim to be able to do 30 languages

i suppose that's true, they do have the benefit of a headstart as u said <3 the 30 languages thing sounds crazy i hope it turns out well

Aa these are all cute! Vocatone, thank you! Also look how Oliver spells name 'OliVER' X , adorable! (And his winter costume so cute ;;)

I think Chiaki (chikas vp) had her own like makeup line or something too bad she didn’t do a promo like that to help more, I’ve def seen some pricey lipstick and stuff with like a random anime girl drawn on it lol.

Or given how “strict” fukases licensing is I’m surprised that sekai no owaris official channel doesn’t do a vocaloid x provider duet or so (and lol fukase himself Is fine but if you look up the band there’s one member who’s a straight up clown surprised there’s not more design insp. with him)

And Arsloid was a bit disappointing but if anything his “group” was just dancers, kinda missed opportunity for him to not be in any games but yeah idk how much his singing voice was known before then or if he was even the “best” among the 5? Person group lol

I know Gumi has an official twitter but community wise I think the only collab is like the “official” comic someone’s drawing on vocatones tumblr with Ollie

it's such a shame that they don't do more collaby promo stuff </3

i think ausgris and audine's designs are nice, tho on vocatone's tumblr they're like "oh yeah our engine's gonna have like 20+ languages" seems overambitious/liek they're biting off more than they can chew unless the y have other businesses funding them or so, bc i'd be happy with like one or two male koreanloids or so, i'm not a kpop stan but some of them do have good voices/ranges rather than just 'industry plants' haha

lol it would be nice to have more languages to play with but considering what we've learned over the years (ppl only care abt weeb shit) it's hard to foresee commercial success tbh </3

what vocatone's doing is cool for representation but i wonder what's with the sudden interest in it lol. trans and nonbinary vocalsynths are always welcome and i love to see other peoples ideas on the concept, but it's funny cause their last two big projects were yohio with red eyes and a (presumably cis) choir boy with one eye. were they all made by the same person?

i'd assume misbah studios had some part in making the character of audine and the current iteration of aurum, so maybe not. aurum was decided to be agender before misbah studios was involved, though.

aurum was initially announced as ausgris in 2016 and was originally male. it looks like one of the reasons vocatone held off on their development was because there were already too many youthful masculine vocals recently (i guess including their own).

(from a 2016 tumblr post they made)

i don't know exactly when they decided to change their gender, but they were confirmed as agender about 5 months after this post, so it would've been sometime between april and september 2016. (for reference, oliver and yohioloid were respectively released in 2011 and 2013).

so you can make of it what you will i suppose. i think it's likely that vocatone has at least a few different people now than it did back then, though!