Board Thread:Off-Topic Discussion/@comment-53539-20171118163527/@comment-4704113-20171119103352

As I said in some other thread, listening to a song in a language you don't understand is a lot different from, say, watching a Let's Play in a language you don't understand, which is one of the most popular uses for Voiceroid in my experience. ( Kotonoha Aoi and Akane in particular seem to be really popular for use in Let's Plays.)  And since the majority of overseas fans seem to be in it mostly for the songs, there's not a whole lot of Voiceroid content that they'd be interested in.

Maybe if there were someone willing to translate/subtitle Voiceroid content and bring it to overseas audiences, things might be different. But I don't think there's anyone really willing to do that. Besides myself, I mean, I love stuff like Voiceroid! It's just that I still don't think my Japanese is quite up to par yet.

And now I'll attempt to answer some of Kajiki's questions, to the best of my abilities! I don't know about "competitors", but I do know that Voiceroid fans do tend to like CeVIO as well. There's even a website dedicated to them both, VOICeVI.com. It doesn't seem to be too active though. Interesting side note: Galaco sometimes shows up alongside the "VOICeVI" characters, likely because of the galaco Talk software.

There are a lot of Japanese Text-to-Speech programs out there. And at least part of that I'm sure is because Japanese is one of the easiest to synthesize languages ever due to how phonetically simple it is. I don't really keep up with the business side of things so, again, I can't speak for "competition". And as for AHS expanding into English, the fact that we're in a thread talking about how no one outside of Japan cares about Voiceroid right now, I'd say probably not.

As you may be able to tell just from how much I've typed about it, I'm probably Voiceroid's biggest English-speaking fan at the moment. Maybe it's because I'm interested in software like Vocaloid because of the technology, rather than the music.