9. The text-to-speech system of claim 7 , wherein the at least one computer is programmed to automatically determine a speaker gender for at least one fourth spoken passage based, at least in part on, gender specific proper names identified in the text source.
7. A text-to-speech system comprising: at least one computer programmed to perform speech synthesis for creating an audio recording from a text source comprising a story including a first character and a second character, wherein the at least one computer is programmed to: automatically identify based, at least in part, on a content of the text source, at least one first spoken passage as being spoken by the first character, at least one second passage as being spoken by the second character, and at least one non-spoken passage within the text source from which speech is to be synthesized to create the audio recording; automatically assign a first voice configuration for the first character to the at least one first spoken passage, a second voice configuration for the second character to the at least one second spoken passage, and a third voice configuration to the at least one non-spoken passage; automatically identify at least one third spoken passage having a measure of certainty regarding an identity of the character speaking the at least one third spoken passage being less than a threshold value; automatically assign to the at least one third spoken passage, a voice configuration for a character assigned to a spoken passage preceding the at least one third spoken passage; and create the audio recording by converting the text source to speech by selectively applying the first voice configuration to the at least one first spoken passage, applying the second voice configuration to the at least one second spoken passage, and applying the third voice configuration to the at least one non-spoken passage.