Abstract: A method (and system) which autonomously generates a cohesive script from a text database for creating a speech corpus for concatenative text-to-speech, and more particularly, which generates cohesive scripts having fluency and natural prosody that can be used to generate compact text-to-speech recordings that cover a plurality of phonetic events.

Abstract: Disclosed is a method, a system and a computer program product for text-to-speech synthesis. The computer program product comprises a computer useable medium including a computer readable program, where the computer readable program when executed on the computer causes the computer to operate in accordance with a text-to-speech synthesis function by operations that include, responsive to at least one phrase represented as recorded human speech to be employed in synthesizing speech, labeling the phrase according to a symbolic categorization of prosodic phenomena; and constructing a data structure that includes word/prosody-categories and word/prosody-category sequences for the phrase, and that further includes information pertaining to a phone sequence associated with the constituent word or word sequence for the phrase.