Recent years have witnessed the remarkable improvement of speech synthesis technology, which is a fundamental component of numerous AI programs. Chinese text-to-speech technology, which has been also rapidly improved, is used in a variety of programs for language teaching and learning as well as automatic translation. This paper examines major problems with Chinese synthesized speech in several widely-used programs, and discusses the prosodic modeling and the types of speech database that can be used to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speech sounds. It further notes that an increasing body of interdisciplinary research between phonetics and engineering may help to develop new analytic methods in the field of Chinese phonology and phonetics.