In this paper we compare two state-of-the-art speech synthesis techniques (corpus-
and HMM-based) in terms of expressive speech synthesis. Two corpora were composed
with different speaking styles (broadcast news and literature reading) from the same
female speaker. Our aim was to determine to what extent the different technologies
reproduce these styles. The corpora and the synthetic expressive speech samples were
evaluated based on objective measures, and a carefully designed perceptual test was
carried out in order to evaluate naturalness, quality and style identification rates
of the generated samples. In our objective assessment we focused on prosodic features
that principally influence the speaking style: F 0 contour, average values and articulatory
speed. Our evaluation of the perceptual test shows that both techniques were able
to capture the main features of expressive speech and although listeners preferred
the HMM-based voice, the speaking style was recognizable in case of both methods.