MAIKA (VOCALOID3)

Involvement in Plan B
This vocal had first appeared during the involvement of a collaboration between Voctro Labs, Ballantine's, theFACT™ and La Oreja de Van Gogh where the people could help to create the lyrics for the famous group. Voctro Labs provided the tools that allowed the participants to listen to their written lyrics sung by the voice through the official website.

It was revealed this voice was a new Vocaloid that was being developed by the company, and was based on the main singer of the band.

In answer to fan's curiosity as to whether the voice would be sold, the company announced they were planning on releasing the voice to the public. She has no official release date, but on October 28th, 2013, Voctro Labs announced that she would be released before Christmas. Later, on November 27, Voctro Labs announced that her release date was December 18th 2013. They also announced that they were still improving the voicebank and adding "some surprises" to the vocals.

Illustration Contest
A contest was held to look for an illustrator that would draw a design for the Vocaloid. Voctro requested that those interested send a sample of their work to the company's email. The deadline for this was 8th of July 2013. After they had reviewed the works of all of their entrants they picked the potential candidates. Over 200 entries were received. The chosen artists then had until the 15th of July to enter a design for Voctro Labs. They were asked to draw a 'pop star', and were given a couple of samples of the voice as reference.

The results were revealed on July 24th. The overall winner was Noriko Hayashi, who also happened to be a runner-up in the previous YOHIOloid design contest. At the announcement they also revealed a silhouette of the design.

Vocals
MAIKA had a phoneme expansion, which allows her sing in Catalan. With her added phonemes, Voctro Labs suggested that she would be able to achieve decent imitation of English and Portuguese, although disclaimed that she would not sound like a native speaker.