89. A voice table for use in a text-to-speech synthesis system, wherein the voice table is pruned from an original voice table according to a machine-implemented method comprising: identifying instances in the original voice table; creating feature vectors derived from a machine perception transformation of time-domain samples corresponding to the instances of speech segments in the original voice table onto a feature space, wherein the machine perception transformation is correlated with human perception by using the time-domain samples retaining both amplitude and phase information of the speech segments, which were provided in sound data for a speech synthesis system; clustering the feature vectors using a similarity measure in the feature space; and replacing the clustered instances corresponding to the clustered feature vectors within a radius by a single instance.
93. The voice table of claim 89 wherein the single instance is the instance corresponding to the centroid of the feature vector cluster.