Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for generating speech. One variation of the method is from a server side, and another variation of the method is from a client side. The server side method, as implemented by a network-based automatic speech processing system, includes first receiving, from a network client independent of knowledge of internal operations of the system, a request to generate a text-to-speech voice. The request can include speech samples, transcriptions of the speech samples, and metadata describing the speech samples. The system extracts sound units from the speech samples based on the transcriptions and generates an interactive demonstration of the text-to-speech voice based on the sound units, the transcriptions, and the metadata, wherein the interactive demonstration hides a back end processing implementation from the network client. The system provides access to the interactive demonstration to the network client.