1. A speech synthesizer for synthesizing speech from text, the speech synthesizer comprising: a) a text parser to parse text to be synthesized into text elements expressible as phonemes; b) a phoneme database containing acoustically rendered phonemes useful to express the text elements; c) a speech synthesis unit to assemble phonemes from the phoneme database and to generate the assembled phonemes as a speech signal, the phonemes being selected to correspond with respective ones of the text elements; wherein the speech synthesis unit can connect adjacent phonemes to provide a continuous speech signal.