Systems and methods for speech synthesis and, in particular, text-to-speech systems and methods for converting a text input to a synthetic waveform by processing prosodic and phonetic content of a spoken example of the text input to accurately mimic the input speech style and pronunciation. Systems and methods provide an interface to a TTS system to allow a user to input a text string and a spoken utterance of the text string, extract prosodic parameters from the spoken input, and process the prosodic parameters to derive corresponding markup for the text input to enable a more natural sounding synthesized speech.