A method of providing a frame-based mel spectral representation of speech includes receiving a text utterance having at least one word and selecting a mel spectral embedding for the text utterance. Each word has at least one syllable and each syllable has at least one phoneme. For each phoneme, the method further includes using the selected mel spectral embedding to: (i) predict a duration of the corresponding phoneme based on corresponding linguistic features associated with the word that includes the corresponding phoneme and corresponding linguistic features associated with the syllable that includes the corresponding phoneme; and (ii) generate a plurality of fixed-length predicted mel-frequency spectrogram frames based on the predicted duration for the corresponding phoneme. Each fixed-length predicted mel-frequency spectrogram frame represents mel-spectral information of the corresponding phoneme.