System and method for hybrid speech synthesis

A speech synthesis system receives symbolic input describing an utterance to be synthesized. In one embodiment, different portions of the utterance are constructed from different sources, one of which is a speech corpus recorded from a human speaker whose voice is to be modeled. The other sources may include other human speech corpora or speech produced using Rule-Based Speech Synthesis (RBSS). At least some portions of the utterance may be constructed by modifying prototype speech units to produce adapted speech units that are contextually appropriate for the utterance. The system concatenates the adapted speech units with the other speech units to produce a speech waveform. In another embodiment, a speech unit of a speech corpus recorded from a human speaker lacks transitions at one or both of its edges. A transition is synthesized using RBSS and concatenated with the speech unit in producing a speech waveform for the utterance.