Although there has long been an interest and recognized need for text-to-speech (TTS) systems to convey emotion in order to sound completely natural, the emotion dimension has largely been tabled until the voice quality of the basic, default emotional state of the system has improved. The state of the art has now reached the point where basic TTS systems provide suitably natural sounding in a large percentage of synthesized sentences. At this point, efforts are being initiated towards expanding such basic systems into ones which are capable of conveying emotion. So far, though, that capability has not yet yielded an interface which would enable a user (either a human or computer application such as a natural language generator) to conveniently specify an emotion desired.