SPEECH SYNTHESIS SYSTEM AND METHOD

A speech synthesis system in a preferred embodiment includes a speech unit storage section, a phonetic environment storage section, a phonetic sequence/prosodic information input section, a plural-speech-unit selection section, a fused-speech-unit sequence generation section, and a fused-speech-unit modification/concatenation section. By fusing a plurality of selected speech units in the fused speech unit sequence generation section, a fused speech unit is generated. In the fused speech unit sequence generation section, the average power information is calculated for a plurality of selected M speech units, N speech units are fused together, and the power information of the fused speech unit is so corrected as to be equalized with the average power information of the M speech units.