INFORMATION PROCESSING APPARATUS AND METHOD

Provided are an information processing apparatus and method so adapted that if a plurality of speech output units having a speech synthesizing function are present, a conversion is made to speech having mutually different feature quantitys so that a user can readily be informed of which unit is providing the user with information such as an alert information. Speech data that is output from another speech output unit is input from a communication unit (8) and stored in a RAM (7). A central processing unit (1) extracts a feature quantity relating to the input speech data. Further, the central processing unit (1) utilizes a speech synthesis dictionary (51) that has been stored in a storage device (5) and generates speech data having a feature quantity different from that of the extracted feature quantity. The generated speech data is output from a speech output unit (4).