A system and method for generating synthetic speech, which operates in a computer implemented Text-To-Speech system. The system comprises at least a speaker database that has been previously created from user recordings, a Front-End system to receive an input text and a Text-To-Speech engine. The Front-End system generates multiple phonetic transcriptions for each word of the input text, and the TTS engine uses a cost function to select which phonetic transcription is the more appropriate for searching the speech segments within the speaker database to be concatenated and synthesized.