Mya (program)
[11] Intended to be a paid service[12] that would be ready by December 2000, Motorola hoped that Mya would also eventually be used on Palm Pilot and by other mobile carriers.
[9] In July 2000 Motorola was reported to be planning to work with Nuance Communications to internationalize Mya,[13] and that same month BellSouth was declared to be the first carrier to buy the service.
[19] Mya's physical representation: a tall, thin,[7] blonde, blue-eyed white female,[5][20] was created in the likeness of a human model,[21][22] Michelle Holgate.
[19] The first representation of Mya had a very small waist and large breasts, and was said to resemble Jessica Rabbit, which did not impress either Motorola or McCann Erickson.
[1][19][24] Digital Domain visual effects supervisor and animation director, Fred Raimondi, decided to remodel Mya's appearance to be "just to the left of real".
[17] While Digital Domain staff wanted Mya to appear in a knee-length skirt with high boots, Motorola and McCann chose the pantsuit, due to its contemporary look.
[23] The evening gown Motorola selected for Mya to debut in was described by Digital Domain as the most difficult item of clothing they could have chosen, due to its transparency and layering.
To render 150 frames (equating to 5–6 seconds of actual footage) of Mya moving in the gown in low-resolution required approximately 6 hours of processing time; the final high-resolution shots took longer.
[17][18] Raimondi said he believed the name Mya was a play on the words 'My assistant',[23] as did Sidney Matrix in the book Cyberpop: Digital Lifestyles and Commodity Culture.
[2][7][10] Mya subsequently received considerable media attention,[18] and was featured on the front covers of USA Today, InStyle, Wired[2][19] and Adbusters.
[18] Noah Robischon from Entertainment Weekly called her debut the second creepiest moment at that year's Academy Awards (the first being Angelina Jolie kissing her brother).
[31][32] Writing in Popular Mechanics, Tobey Grumet described Mya as a male-chauvinistic creation,[9] and she was cited in the 2006 book Physical Culture, Power, and the Body as an example of simulated sexualised females.
[5] Sidney Matrix stated that Mya's seductive appearance and sultry voice "depended on, borrowed from and retrench[ed] sexist stereotypes", and accused Motorola of normalising the assumption that technology users are both male and heterosexual.
Though Mya's character was generally regarded as impressive, the underlying technology was described by Peggy Albright in Wireless Week as not surprising; Albright said Motorola was "latest company in recent weeks to introduce a voice-activated virtual assistant", as Mya was announced shortly after Microsoft had announced their MiPad, and Lucent had launched their Mobile Voice Activated Dialing software.
[26] However, Tobey Grummet spoke highly of the program in anticipation of its release,[9] and Mya was described by Elliot Drucker of Wireless Week as a solution to the limitations of accessing the Internet on a mobile phone, without a keyboard or large colour display.
[8] Dawn Chmielewski from the Orange County Register called Mya a "crude interpretation of things to come", noting that speech technology at the time was not without its limitations.
[35] You need to speak like a BBC broadcaster to be understood and use the vocabulary of a toddler to get what you want.The program won the "Most Innovative Telephony Application" award at the 20th Annual AVIOS Conference in April 2001.
