A text-to-speech synthesis system that synthesizes speech from unrestricted text is discussed. The text analysis system, which includes text preprocessing, phrasing and intonation, and letter-to-phoneme conversion, is described. The analyzed text is represented by phonetic characters, stress values, minor- and major-phrase markers, and intonational descriptors. The synthesizer uses this information to compute a speech signal in several stages. The duration of the different speech events is computed, and the intonational descriptors are converted to a fundamental frequency contour. Loudness control is also generated. After these prosodic parameters have been computed, the synthesis parameters that describe the different sounds or phonemes are generated. These parameters are converted to speech by a waveform synthesizer. >