This paper describes the development of a Brazilian Portuguese text-to-speech system which applies a technique wherein speech is directly synthesized from hidden Markov models. In order to build the synthesizer a speech database was recorded and phonetically segmented. Furthermore, contextual informations about syllables, words, phrases, and utterances were determined, as well as questions for decision tree-based context clustering algorithms. The resulting system presents a fair reproduction of the prosody even when a small database is used for training.