Although performing poorly in the Blizzard Challenge 2008, the CircumReality text-to-speech engine improved significantly from the Blizzard 2007 test. The engine’s acoustic model, prosody model, and acoustic synthesis were improved between tests. This paper discusses the CircumReality engine’s test results and reasons why it did poorly. The paper provides a list of improvements that resulted in higher test scores in 2008, as well as implementation details one change: objectively-calculated target costs.