Distributed speech unit inventory for TTS systems

In a text-to-speech (TTS) system, a database including sample speech units for unit selection may be configured for use by a local device. The local unit database may be created from a more comprehensive unit database. The local unit database may include units which provide sufficient TTS results for frequently input text. Speech synthesis may then be performed by concatenating locally available units with units from a remote device including the comprehensive unit database. Aspects of the speech synthesis may be performed by the remote device and/or the local device.