Under construction.
Information pending.
The ARiA engine and its Adaptation
Alter/ego uses the ARiA engine, first developed for use with the software Chipspeech. As such, many features of the two software are identical. What separates the two versions is the direction. Chipspeech focuses on vintage synthesizing, while Alter/ego focuses on modern synthesizing styles.
The ARiA engine was developed to be flexible, owed to the nature of the vocals used in Chipspeech. Due to having to recreate the vintage vocals in various ways, ARiA had to be able to be easily adapted to used various methods to achieve the same result. It took recorded X-SAMPA samples and vintage data and recreated the result into the ARiA engine to produce a synthesizer result close to the original sound of the synthesizer the vocal was based on.
Alter/ego focuses mostly on the Formant Singer method of achieving results, as used by Dandy 704, Lady Parsec and Bert Gotrax. Daisy, being the first Alter/ego vocal used this method to synthesizer her vocal. The Formant Singer has a monotone result with high flexibility to it, in contrast to Synthesizers such as Vocaloid which uses multiple layers giving a more realistic, but limiting, result.
Currently, Alter/ego has several variants of voicebanks it can use. Owed to the flexible nature of the ARiA engine, new types of databases can be written for the engine, so new voicebanks such as languages can be developed. The result is the ARiA engine can be adapted in many possible ways, avoiding a restriction of some other synthesizers of being limited to a fixed language or direction only.
English/Japanese or "En"/"Jp"
Seen originally with Daisy, this is the voicebank that was used in the original ARiA engine for Chipspeech. The lyrics reference a X-SAMPA library of combined sounds for English and Japanese. While Japanese and English has similar sounds in some cases, the X-SAMPA for other sounds is identical, but the result is different. This is occasionally displayed by the combined vocals of Daisy and Chipspeech. Modern Alter/ego voicebanks usually separate the English and Japanese vocals.
Some releases such as ALYS (jp) only will have sounds for one of the two languages, in this case Japanese. However, sounds for the English lyrics still register, as English lyrics can still be typed in, but it does not contain a full X-SAMPA list for both languages. The resulting English is far from perfect, resulting in a low quality English which is often broken and can be gibberish. Bones (en) and Bones (jp) also display this same problem when a person tries to use Japanese in Bones (en) and English in Bones (jp).
The English portion of the database has been improved since Daisy, with later vocals such as NATA displaying a much better grasp of the language compared to her.
French or "Fr"
The first major adaption of the engine that was eventually released was for French. The French voicebank has a dedicated database for only French X-SAMPA sounds compared to English or Japanese whih uses a combined of two languagese. The first released vocal for this adaptation of the engine is Alys.
Talk or Talker
This first appeared in Chipspeech with all characters, exception having been Daisy, being given the ability to talk. "Talker" voicebanks are limited currently to English only. Bones is the first Alter/ego vocal to have a Talker voicebank known as "Bones (talker)".
Chinese or "Chn"
The latest known adaptation of the engine is Chinese Mandarin. Bones currently has a vocal being developed for him in this language.