INTERNET Panel at Niconico Chokaigi 2

On the first day of the second ever niconico-oriented festival, Chokaigi, INTERNET Co., Ltd. presented a Megpoid-centered panel giving out the latest information. As this was part of a niconico event, the panel was broadcasted live as well. Amongst other things, the panel demonstrated Megpoid English, hinted at a new GUMI speech synthesis project, and then finally talked about a GUMI music contest.

CEO Noboru Murakami, along with musician Ogawa Etsuji and GUMI cosplayer Yuki, started by playing the demo song Miraculous Encounter, and then he proceeded to work with the newly released Megpoid English voice bank live, demonstrating its features.

Afterwards, Murakami, with his screen hidden, hinted at a new product by playing back what sounds like GUMI narrating a passage. Unlike AH-Software’s VOICEROID products, the synthesized speech seems to be able to ride a gradual pitch curve as well. Furthermore, Murakami noted that this engine can also use arbitrary pitch curves drawn by the user, and there’s also the option to record a speaker’s voice to automatically grab the intonation to apply to the synthesized speech. Current offerings by AH-Software only provide a limited ability to modify intonation by specifying whether some syllable was “high” or “low”. Murakami notes that this software is still in early development and it’s likely that people will have forgotten about it before its final release date.

Amongst other announcements was a contest to celebrate the four-year anniversary of Megpoid’s release. GUMI MUSIC CONTEST 2013 is being held by INTERNET-affiliated VOCALOID music label VOCALOTRACKS, with June 26 as the deadline for entries. Entries must use only INTERNET voice banks and have to feature at least one Megpoid sound bank, be in MP3 format, be less than four minutes long, and be less than 5MB in size. Winning entries will be released on iTunes and Amazon MP3 via the record label. The panel then closed with the Megpoid English demo song, You Are The Reason.


5 thoughts on “INTERNET Panel at Niconico Chokaigi 2”

  1. Sure would be nice if Yamaha took Vocaloid speech synthesis seriously again. I know they had a Vocaloid-Flex engine a couple of years ago that was supposedly optimized for speech rather than singing. Maybe that’s the direction Vocaloid 4 ought to go in. An improved editor and tool set designed for singing or speech synthesis.

  2. “Winning entries will be released on iTunes and Amazon MP3 via the record label.”
    Humm, I think there’s something missing in this sentence 😉 which record label are we speaking here ? KarenT ? Or is it this new Vocaloid label I don’t recall the name ?

  3. Mr Murakami tweeted about voice synthesis several months ago. He even seemed to like one of my suggestions for a name to compete with AHS’s voiceroid brand. I am glad that Internet is pursuing it beyond the aspirational phase.

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