That would make sense, Otamakazaha has also been in the know about stuff before so it's a fairly educated guess. I think they might start the beta soon, then.
On an aside, I've been very excited about the deep-learning update and how it will affect the voices we already have. In particular I've been thinking about the Color Voice Series. Since most new fans won't be aware of them considering they've had literally 0 promotion since like 2016 and JOYSOUND don't ever mention them anymore, it seems like a good time to re-introduce them. After the character's name (which will link to their profile) I will include links to their demonstration songs.
Color Voice Series
JOYSOUND Page
The Color Voice Series are a group of CeVIO Song vocals released in 2015 by XING Inc., and after ONE's Talk bank the first third-party vocals for the software. There are 6 vocals split in to three main groups, which could be characterised as power, soft and enka. They were released in three waves from February through April.
The first vocals released were
Akasaki Minato (1) (2) and
Midorizaki Kasumi (1) (2), representing the colors red and green respectively. Minato is one of two power vocals, and Kasumi is a soft vocal. They were relatively well recieved and precieved as being decently high quality voicebanks, with Minato easily being one of the more popular CeVIO banks currently by virtue of being the only powerful male vocal.
The second set of vocals released were both intended for enka, being
Ginsaki Yamato (1) (2) and
Kinzaki Koharu (1) (2), of course representing silver and gold respectively. These two were not particularly well recieved as they were seen to be lacking in quality (likely due to CeVIO's synthesis method) as well as having a relatively limited range of viable genres. Nevertheless they do have fans, and it will be interesting the see how they sound with the deep-learning update.
The last two vocals, quite like the first set, were a duo of soft and power vocals called
Shirosaki Yuudai (1) (2) and
Kizaki Airi (1) (2) respectively, representing white and yellow. Kizaki Airi was easily the best recieved of the two for her powerful vocals, and comparison was drawn quite often between her and MEIKO's V1 voicebank. One of my most popular uploads (and arguably the most popular work with Airi, which is criminal) is a cover of Hajime Ni using Airi, after I bought her on release and frantically made the cover. Yuudai, on the other hand, was very poorly recieved other than by a few fans as he easily had the worst-sounding voicebank. I have a lot of hope, however, that he'll sound a lot more stable with the DNN update.
Overall, there were 3 voicebanks well-recieved at launch (Minato, Kasumi and Airi) and 3 which... suffered a bit with CeVIO's current synthesis method. Considering they were all produced by XING Inc. I'm of course assuming they were all recorded in the same conditions, and it just happens that they results ended up being as such. Looking forward hearing them with DNN synthesis, and considering how Sasara sounds with it I think we'll all be pleasantly surprised.