A system for synthesising expressive speech includes: an interface configured to receive an input text for conversion to speech; a memory; and at least one processor coupled to the memory. The processor is configured to generate, using an expressivity characterisation module, a plurality of expression vectors, wherein each expression vector is a representation of prosodic information in a reference audio style file, and synthesise expressive speech from the input text, using an expressive acoustic model comprising a deep convolutional neural network that is conditioned by at least one of the plurality of expression vectors.
EXPRESSIVE TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYSTEM AND METHOD