A synthesis method, called speech synthesis from concept, is described which has been designed specifically for providing speech output from information systems. It differs from conventional techniques in that data is passed from the information system to the speech synthesis system, not in the form of text or phonetic transcription, but in the form of an abstract structure called an input concept. The speech synthesis from concept system converts an input concept into speech by using a transformational grammar to generate a well‐formed English sentence and a word concatenation synthesizer to generate the actual speech output. The ’’top down’’ nature of this process reduces the computation required within the information system and enables high‐quality speech to be produced.