RUBY

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

2014
Development on Ruby started in December 2013 with only Prince Syo working on her, until Anders joined development half a year later.

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.

During Feburary Syo began to comment on Ruby's pronunciations. 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. 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".