The speech synthesizer is personalized to sound like or mimic the speech characteristics of an individual speaker. The individual speaker provides a quantity of enrollment data, which can be extracted from a short quantity of speech, and the system modifies the base synthesis parameters to more closely resemble those of the new speaker. More specifically, the synthesis parameters may be decomposed into speaker dependent parameters, such as context-independent parameters, and speaker independent parameters, such as context dependent parameters. The speaker dependent parameters are adapted using enrollment data from the new speaker. After adaptation, the speaker dependent parameters are combined with the speaker independent parameters to provide a set of personalized synthesis parameters. To adapt the parameters with a small amount of enrollment data, an eigenspace is constructed and used to constrain the position of the new speaker so that context independent parameters not provided by the new speaker may be estimated.