Mya was an intelligent personal assistant under development by Motorola in the year 2000. Proposed features for the program included the ability to read emails and answer questions 24 hours a day. Mya was intended to work with an internet service Motorola was developing called Myosphere, and was planned to be a paid service that would eventually be used by other mobile carriers. A female computer-generated character was created to represent Mya in advertising. While the quality of the character's animation was praised, it received criticism for being over sexualised.

Both the character and the program were announced to the public via an advertisement in March 2000, though the program was not ready for use at that time. Despite the announcement generating a considerable amount of attention, little was heard regarding the project in subsequent months. The program was never officially released nor cancelled, though the trademarks for both Myosphere and Mya were abandoned by Motorola in 2002. The name Mya was believed to be a play on the words 'My assistant'.

The Internet service that Mya was developed for was called Myosphere. Motorola began development of Myosphere in 1998, and it had been described as a speech enabled service "which enables consumers to manage and control wireless and wireline communications from a single point of access using natural voice commands." Several other companies had already announced plans for similar software at the time; Alan Reiter from Wireless Internet and Mobile Computing was puzzled at Motorola's announcement of Myosphere, saying "They're kind of late to the [voice activation] party. But the party is likely to be very big. ... Motorola's entry will help further legitimize the value of voice response systems. But it's a tough market, and it will take time." The term myosphere was "a play on the theme of connecting the elements of an individual's world, or sphere."

Intended to provide a human-like interface to the Internet, Mya was to be accessed via a toll-free telephone number and a pin code. The program was designed to work with any phone, including landlines, but primarily for mobiles, and was to be accessible 24 hours a day. Mya was said to be able to answer questions on topics such as stock prices, news, sports, weather conditions, traffic, airline reservations, addresses, and appointments, as well as being able to call contacts in a mobile phone's address book.

Intended to be a paid service that would be ready by December 2000, Motorola hoped that Mya would also eventually be used on Palm Pilot and by other mobile carriers. In July 2000 Motorola was reported to be planning to work with Nuance Communications to internationalize Mya, and that same month BellSouth was declared to be the first carrier to buy the service. According to an article in Popular Science in August 2000, Motorola was spending "millions of dollars" on both the Mya character and the program. Mya was originally programmed only for English, though by April 2001 the program was being developed in six languages, and additionally Nippon Telegraph and Telephone were said to be working with Motorola to develop a Japanese version. Mya was voiced by actress Gabrielle Carteris, and mechanically altered to sound more digital.

To create a commercial for Mya, Motorola hired the McCann Erickson company, who in turn hired Digital Domain to create the character. The design was described as a "big-budget" production, though Digital Domain were only given three months to complete the project. Mya's physical representation: a tall, thin, blonde, blue-eyed white female, was created in the likeness of a human model, Michelle Holgate. The initial inspiration for Mya came from vintage pin-up girls. 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. Motorola asked Digital Domain to make Mya look as human as possible yet still be obviously artificial. The first completed iteration of Mya was so realistic that Motorola asked for her to be made more obviously digital. Viewers were reportedly not impressed with Mya, because they thought she was a real person. Digital Domain visual effects supervisor and animation director, Fred Raimondi, decided to remodel Mya's appearance to be "just to the left of real".

You know how when you first looked at Max Headroom and were like 'What is that?' That's [the effect] we were after.

— Fred Raimondi