RUBY

Ruby is an upcoming English VOCALOID to be developed for the VOCALOID4 engine by VocaTone.

2013
Development on Ruby started in December 2013 with only Prince Syo working on her, until Anders joined development half a year later.

2014
On September 19th, 2014, Syo revealed that he and Anders were working on a VOCALOID. Later that day, a voice sample was posted for Ruby. She was confirmed to have an American voice provider.

As of now, there is no confirmation that PowerFX has any affiliation with Ruby. Only VocaTone is known to be currently involved.

Ruby was originally going to be due before Christmas of 2014, however, PowerFX confirmed that she would be postponed.

On October 30, Natasha Allegri posted pictures of concept art requested by VocaTone a few months earlier. At the time, it was not confirmed whether this concept art would be used in Ruby's final design, or whether Allegri would be the official artist. It was confirmed that another artist had been also requested to submit concept art for consideration.

2015
On January 23, 2015, a sample covering EmpathP's Witness was discovered. However, Syo revealed that this was from early in production, stating that Problem is a more up to date sample of her voicebank. Syo expressed a desire to create at least two voicebanks for Ruby to take advantage of VOCALOID4's cross synthesis capabilities, but was unsure due to the doubled workload.

Syo noted that Ruby didn't use the same script as CYBER DIVA and instead used a script created from scratch that is also an improvement on the older YAMAHA script used for YOHIOloid.

Syo had the VOCALOID4 installed by Feb 4th 2015. It was commented that they would most likely go with PowerFX.

During Feburary Syo began to comment on Ruby's pronunciations including new words added to Ruby's dictionary. Syo ad finished adding the 300 most common words and was now looking to add random words to her dictionary such as "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and "milf".

The following words were added;
 * "anime" "manga"
 * "sasuke Uchiha"
 * "girugamesh"
 * "Naruto" and the names of other vocaloids were added.
 * In response to someone else request the names of every pokemon being added to her dictionary, "Pokemon" and "Pikachu" were added while being noted that these were the only two they were going to add.
 * Queef"
 * "syo"
 * "obama", "beyonce"
 * "otaku"
 * "schlong", "schlongs"
 * "Hunty" and "hunties"
 * "Twink" and "Twinks" was added but not "cummies".
 * The words "krunk" and "schwasted" were added.
 * Since X-rated stuff had already been added to Vocaloid content, "pornstar" and "pornstars" were added to her dictionary so that Ruby had the word "porn" at her disposal.
 * A comment was made how she could now pronounce "pendeja".
 * "chipotle"
 * "yolo"

It was commented that Ruby now knew many bad words.

In one of the more random comments, Syo noted that VOCALOID's dictionary represents fajita as "f V dZ i: t V". Syo commented about considering adding triphones to certain sounds to make the diaphones sound more natural. They noted that they wish they could give Ruby a "X" sound so she could pronounce words like "bach" and "lock" correctly. They commented that English was the only Germanic language which did not prounce the "gh/ch" sound anymore, commenting how "right" and "laugh" would sound if they were still pronounced the same way as old English. Syo joked on their twitter account about how Ruby can now pronounce the word "ew" correctly. This was achieved by adjusting the dictionary and adding a triphonetic data related to it. Syo later commented about how difficult it was to get a English vocaloid to pronounce the word "idea" in just two syllables. Ruby was also being set up to pronounce "fire" and "hour" in one syllable. The comment was also made to change the sound to an alternative one, you can add "2".

It was confirmed that Ruby originally had a Japanese voicebank, but this was scrapped due to increased workload after the transition to V4, and the possibility of having to pay for a licence for each. The extra workload was owed to the increase in triphonetic data, in addition PowerFX was only willing to pay for one English vocal. However, Syo noted that other vocals can be added depending on the success of Ruby's first vocal. Syo also confirmed that some of Ruby's recordings had recently been redone to improve them so they sounded similair to her Japanese vocal. Syo also agreed that the Japanese vocal sounded better overall. Syo confirmed PowerFX wants to see how well the English vocal sells before adding any additional vocals.

Syo also confirmed that the tester audio clips found in early 2015 were not the original uploads of those samples. Syo explained that they had been removed and someone else had now re-uploaded them. However, there was no objection to them existing so long as everyone acknowledged that they were of early versions of Ruby's vocal and that they did not reflect the current status of the project. "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" was explained as a quick test to see how the vocal sounded before production.

On March 12th, a mail by Bil Bryant from PowerFX confirmed that Ruby was planned for a future release before summer 2015.

On March 14, her dictionary was reported at almost 5,800 words.

Syo had also dropped hints Ruby's voice provider wasn't white.

On March 19, Syo confirmed that Ruby knew over 5,900 words and was almost complete. In a tweet the day before, Sy stated that 100 of those words were random words. Syo also confirmed Ruby can says memes. One of the first words added was "Antidisestablishmentarianism". "Proletariat" had also been added, so was "Communist", once again it was stated "Cummies" would not be added. "balegdah" was also added.

Syo spoke about Ruby, stating that of VocaTone, only Anders was helping with Ruby. Syo mentioned that they didn't consider themself part of the VocaTone team and note that the "devlopment team" didn't exist, that it was mostly themself working on Ruby.