Reading
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 8.4 – Diphone Waveform Synthesis
A simple way to generate a waveform is by concatenating speech units from a pre-recorded database. The database contains one recording of each required speech unit.
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 8.5 – Unit Selection (Waveform) Synthesis
A brief explanation. Worth reading before tackling the more substantial chapter in Taylor (Speech Synthesis course only).
Holmes & Holmes – Chapter 5 – Message synthesis from stored human speech components
Pitch-synchronous overlap-and-add (PSOLA) remains a key technique in speech signal processing.
Taylor – Section 12.7 – Pitch and epoch detection
Only an outline of the main approaches, with little technical detail. Useful as a summary of why these tasks are harder than you might think.