As I mentioned at the beginning of this page, some vocal synth characters have made appearances in anime. This has happened a number of times ever since Miku blew up, but below are the few instances where the characters are voiced and also appear for longer than a couple seconds on screen.

Miku in Shinkalion

An 11 year old version of Miku made an appearance as a character in a few episodes of Shinkansen Henkei Robo Shinkalion, starting from episode 15. She was voiced by her voice provider, Fujita Saki, with a robotic voice filter to make her sound more like Miku.

Miku in Jashin-chan Dropkick

For some random reason, Miku had a short scene or brief appearance in every episode of the third season of the anime Jashin-chan Dropkick. Most times she appeared in a humourous way. Again, voiced by Fujita Saki with a filter. I mean, Jashin-chan Dropkick is fine and all, and I love to see Miku animated, but why is this most amount of screentime that regular Miku has had in any anime?

Yukari in Hagane Orchestra

Somehow, Yukari (and Tsurumaki Maki) made an appearance in the eighth episode of the anime for a now-defunct mobile game, Hagane Orchestra. They both appeared as playable characters in the game too. Yukari and Maki were both not voiced by any real person in the anime. Instead their voices came from the Voiceroid text-to-speech software that they were available in. They sounded fine like that, but they could have actually sounded more human if the creators used community mods made for Voiceroid that can do that.

Kiritan in Zunda Horizon

Kiritan and her sisters made an appearance in an ONA comissioned by their creators. And all the characters were voiced by humans, without any filters. In my honest opinion, this anime isn't interesting, and I don't think you're missing out if you don't watch it. But it's cool to see Kiritan animated.

Voiceroid Text-to-speech Fun

Vocaloid may have paved the way for singing synthesizer characters, but a different piece of software called Voiceroid paved the way for speech synthesizer characters. Voiceroid created a interesting genre of videos where characters from the software talk or make commentary in videos. This could be characters just chatting and playing out a scene, called VOICEROID劇場 (Voiceroid theatre). It could also be let's play videos where one or more characters commentate on the game being played, called VOICEROID実況 (Voiceroid commentary/let's play). There are also videos where the characters commentate inside a car while being driven around, called VOICEROID車載 (Voiceroid in-vechicle). I've seen other stuff like food videos where characters comment on the tasty food being cooked and then eaten.

These videos are usually made with a piece of video editing software called AviUtl, which has unofficial English versions, but seems to be mainly developed in Japanese. Artists create puppets for the characters that are put into the videos. Then, the video creator uses these puppets with their speech and move them around in various scenes, or just have them in the corner for let's play videos. And AviUtl can either have the characters flap their mouth when they speak, or lip sync along with with what they are saying using the Voiceroid speech files or something. I've seen AviUtl also used for singing videos, some with Miku even.

There is this group of characters I'm just going to call the "Voiceroid squad" because they appear together in videos, fan art, and fan manga together very often. The Voiceroid squad includes Yukari, Una, Akane, Aoi, Kiritan, and Akari. Also there is Tohoku Zunko & Itako, and Tsurumaki Maki. Fans have created this imaginary universe where they all hang out and chat and go to school with each other. It looks pretty fun. Apparently the Voiceroid software has ceased development because of some corporate disagreement, but these characters are all being moved over to a new piece of software called A.I.VOICE. So the Voiceroid squad will still live on, just without Voiceroid being maintained.

In the first few years some characters in the Voiceroid squad were also available as Vocaloids, like Yukari and Zunko, while others like the Kotonoha sisters were just speech-only. However, that didn't stop fans from trying to make songs with the officially speech-only characters. There are fan-made mods & utilities like KotonoSync, KotonoTone, and VocalShifter that allow songs to be made with these characters. A lot of my favourite songs from the Voiceroid squad were made using Voiceroid and these mods. The companies making these speech-only characters did notice that fans really want them to sing and have made official singing synthesizers for them either in CeVIO AI or in Synth V. Apparently A.I.VOICE might be able to sing officially some day, but people still made mods to have characters in the program sing.

Voiceroid wasn't the only game in town though. CeVIO had a speech component too in addition to it's singing part. In the beginning, only Sasara could both sing and speak, but there were two other characters in CeVIO, Suzuki Tsudumi & Takahashi that had speech components (Tsudumi later got a singing component). People did make let's play series with characters from separate software, even though that could have been a little cumbersome to put together and edit. There was a popular Yukari and Sasara Minecraft let's play series in the early 2010s actually. Otomachi Una early on had a speech component called TalkEX, but didn't come onto Voiceroid until about 3 years after that, but people still made various UnaKiri videos with her and Kiritan before that.

So right now CeVIO and A.I.VOICE, plus unmaintained Voiceroid are main big speech synths that are being used to make this cool content (though you should keep an eye on the software VOICEPEAK & VOICEVOX). New speech characters are being made, the most recent noteworthy release in my opinion probably being the Otaru Shiokaze trio (Rikka, Karin, Chifuyu), which are available on Synth V for singing, and CeVIO for speech. Apparently Rikka was originally supposed to be a Voiceroid, but the end of Voiceroid's development resulted in that being cancelled, and her being moved over to CeVIO for speech.

I don't know why this stuff doesn't really seem to be on the radar in English-speaking weeb communities. I can see that these characters are noticed and have seen some English weebs who talk about them, but there's basically nobody who seems to be really into this stuff and tries to translate it. (Side note: many of these videos are subtitled in Japanese so I guess you can use them help learn Japanese by being able to read what you hear.) Hoeverrr, there is a fan community for these speech characters in... China? Chinese people repost & translate this stuff on Bilibili and I think have even made original content over there. So that's nice at least.

Una Train!

Did you know that there is an Una Train?

Yeah, there's an Una train in Japan. The Una train even appeared on TV.

This train is running on the Tenryu Hamanako Line in Shizuoka. The Una train design above appears to be no longer running, but there is a new Una train design that's been running since fall 2022.

Links To Other Places

Here are a few other places you can check out for more vocal synth content:

• Epic Singing Synthesizer Songs (Me)
• Singing Synthesizers Infinitely (Me)
• Magnapina's Vocaloid Pages: [Link]
• Koinuko's Vocaloid Pages: [Link 1] [Link 2]
• Clam Hanson's Vocaloid Page: [Link]
• Holeinmyheart's translations: [Linky-link]
• KoToNo Translations (vocal synth manga translations I worked on)