Abstract: In a distributed text-to-speech (TTS) system, a remote TTS device, such as a TTS server, may experience increased loads of TTS requests, which may result in delayed processing of TTS requests. To avoid such delays, upon indication or prediction of an increased load, a TTS server may adjust unit selection TTS processing by altering unit selection techniques to speed processing, at the expense of potential result quality. Such techniques may include use of a reduced size unit database, a narrow Viterbi beam search, and/or a reduced size candidate unit graph.

Abstract: In delivering text-to-speech (TTS) results to a user, the time between the user request and delivery of initial TTS results is reduced using one or more of various techniques. Caching of TTS results may be reconfigured to cache unit indices rather than full speech synthesis results. More powerful computing resources may be dedicated to early TTS processing. A user may be notified of TTS results prior to complete processing of a TTS request. Early TTS processing may be performed by a local device and then passed to a remote device.

Abstract: Text-to-speech (TTS) processing systems may be divided among remote TTS servers which are accessible through a network connection to local user devices. The costs for performing processing on these servers may vary according to time. To improve efficiency of TTS processing certain requests may be scheduled during low cost server times. A user may indicate a preference for such low cost delivery. A user may also indicate a preference for quick turnaround time, permitting scheduling of TTS processing during higher cost server times. A TTS processing system may also consider quality of TTS results when scheduling server processing time for a particular TTS request and may allocate more server time when higher quality results are desired.