1. A method for synthesizing a target voice, the method comprising: receiving symbolic input descriptive of an utterance to be synthesized; selecting one or more portions of the utterance to be constructed from certain Phone-and-Transition (P&T) speech units that function as prototype speech units, the prototype speech units obtained from a target voice corpus, the target voice corpus including speech units recorded from a human speaker, the target voice corpus configured to provide characteristics of the target voice; applying adaptations to selected ones of the prototype speech units of the target voice corpus that are derived from a context different than the one in which they are to be used in the utterance, to produce adapted units that are contextually appropriate for the utterance; obtaining at least some speech units from a source other than the target voice corpus; and concatenating at least the adapted speech units from the target voice corpus and the speech units from the source other than the target voice corpus to produce a speech waveform for the utterance.
1. A method for synthesizing a target voice, the method comprising: receiving symbolic input descriptive of an utterance to be synthesized; selecting one or more portions of the utterance to be constructed from certain Phone-and-Transition (P&T) speech units that function as prototype speech units, the prototype speech units obtained from a target voice corpus, the target voice corpus including speech units recorded from a human speaker, the target voice corpus configured to provide characteristics of the target voice; applying adaptations to selected ones of the prototype speech units of the target voice corpus that are derived from a context different than the one in which they are to be used in the utterance, to produce adapted units that are contextually appropriate for the utterance; obtaining at least some speech units from a source other than the target voice corpus; and concatenating at least the adapted speech units from the target voice corpus and the speech units from the source other than the target voice corpus to produce a speech waveform for the utterance. 10. The method of claim 1 wherein the adaptations comprise an adaptation that time reverses at least a portion of one of the stored prototype speech units.