To provide a means for improving the results of funeral furnishers who operate funeral ceremony by developing a method and an apparatus that give a chance for expressing their condolence to the attendants of funeral ceremonies, and execute editing and processing in an allowable short time so that a condolence speech whose length is undecided can be subjected to condolence speech collection editing to a record medium and the condolence speech can be utilized for funeral ceremony operation direction.

The required time of the recorded condolence speech is accumulated, and the condolence speech collection is edited corresponding to the capacity of the recording medium based on the capacity of the recording medium. Additionally, the processing and editing are made by corresponding to condolence broadcast allowable time assigned to funeral ceremony progress, and the condolence speech is broadcasted and outputted according to the progress stage of the funeral ceremony.