MAIKA Power and Soft Confirmed!

While many people noticed “Power” and “Soft” voices available in some of Voctro Lab’s newest research, the company never specifically said MAIKA Power and Soft were actual voice banks… until now! A new post from the company confirms that there is indeed a MAIKA Power and a MAIKA Soft. However, please note that these are NOT confirmed VOCALOID voice banks. Instead, they are used in Voctro’s new research. And while these could be VOCALOID voice banks in the future, there’s no confirmation.

About the Project

While there’s a whole research paper available, we’ll keep things short in layman’s terms. The project aimed to test how vocal synths would work with a machine programming them versus a human. The research team noticed that current vocal synths can only improve so much and decided to try a different approach. Machine learning, however, usually provided far less realistic results, so the project was made to attempt to get the best of both worlds: the realism of current vocal synths with the flexibility of easier to improve machine learning.

MAIKA Power & Soft

Those who visited the samples website clearly heard MAIKA’s voice in the Spanish samples. There are “Mix,” “Acapella,” “Soft VQ,” and “Power VQ” samples available. However, the Soft and Power VQs weren’t confirmed to be different banks. For all we knew, the machine could have learned to manipulate the voices to create more powerful or softer vocals.

As noted earlier, these are NOT confirmed VOCALOID voice banks. While we won’t rule out the possibility, we also can’t guarantee it.

Instead, all we can do is wait. MAIKA doesn’t have a V4 update yet, so there is a possibility. However, the chance that these voices were just for the research is also a high possibility.

More Information

Research Paper
Vocal Samples (Please note that the English samples are NOT confirmed to be any available or upcoming voice banks!)
Official MAIKA Facebook
Voctro Labs Official Facebook

And, as always, stay tuned to VNN for more updates!