10. A system for selecting a preferred phonetic transcription for use in synthesizing speech from an input text, the system comprising: at least one storage medium storing a plurality of speech segments that may be concatenated to synthesize speech; at least one input to receive the input text; and at least one computer coupled to the at least one input and capable of accessing the at least one storage medium, the at least one computer programmed to: generate a plurality of phonetic transcriptions for at least one word of the input text to be synthesized, each of the plurality of phonetic transcriptions corresponding to a respective pronunciation that is of the at least one word as a whole, and is different from at least one other pronunciation corresponding to at least one other of the plurality of phonetic transcriptions; compute at least one concatenative cost score for each one of the plurality of phonetic transcriptions to create a plurality of concatenative cost scores, the at least one concatenative cost score for each one of the plurality of phonetic transcriptions indicating at least one cost of concatenating selected speech segments from the stored plurality of speech segments associated with the respective one of the plurality of phonetic transcriptions; and select the preferred phonetic transcription from the plurality of phonetic transcriptions for use in text-to-speech synthesizing the at least one word based, at least in part, on the at least one concatenative cost score associated with the preferred phonetic transcription.
10. A system for selecting a preferred phonetic transcription for use in synthesizing speech from an input text, the system comprising: at least one storage medium storing a plurality of speech segments that may be concatenated to synthesize speech; at least one input to receive the input text; and at least one computer coupled to the at least one input and capable of accessing the at least one storage medium, the at least one computer programmed to: generate a plurality of phonetic transcriptions for at least one word of the input text to be synthesized, each of the plurality of phonetic transcriptions corresponding to a respective pronunciation that is of the at least one word as a whole, and is different from at least one other pronunciation corresponding to at least one other of the plurality of phonetic transcriptions; compute at least one concatenative cost score for each one of the plurality of phonetic transcriptions to create a plurality of concatenative cost scores, the at least one concatenative cost score for each one of the plurality of phonetic transcriptions indicating at least one cost of concatenating selected speech segments from the stored plurality of speech segments associated with the respective one of the plurality of phonetic transcriptions; and select the preferred phonetic transcription from the plurality of phonetic transcriptions for use in text-to-speech synthesizing the at least one word based, at least in part, on the at least one concatenative cost score associated with the preferred phonetic transcription. 16. The system of claim 10 , wherein the at least one computer is programmed to compute the plurality of concatenative cost scores using a concatenative cost function that favors at least one phonetic criterion.