Abstract: Recorded or synthesized speech segments of text-to-speech (TTS) systems may be compressed though the use of both time domain compression and perceptual compression techniques. The twice-compressed recording may be separated into speech segments corresponding to words or subword units for use in a TTS system. The compression rate of time domain compression, and the ratio of time domain compression to perceptual compression, may be modified for any speech segment. The compression amount or ratio may be determined based on linguistic or acoustic features of the word or subword unit that the speech segment represents. Differing compression amounts and ratios may be applied to portions of a single speech segment.