Patent ID: 8571871

Claim:
A method, comprising: determining one or more characteristics of an environment of a device, wherein the device includes a text-to-speech module, wherein the one or more characteristics include one or more characteristics of a background sound in the environment of the device, and wherein the one or more characteristics of the environment are time-varying; determining, based on the one or more characteristics of the environment, one or more speech parameters that characterize a voice output of the text-to-speech module, wherein determining the one or more speech parameters comprises: determining a transform to convert a first set of speech parameters determined for a substantially sound-free background environment to a second set of speech parameters that includes Lombard parameters determined for a given environment with a previously determined background sound condition, wherein the Lombard parameters are determined such that the voice output is intelligible in the previously determined background sound condition, modifying, based on the one or more characteristics, the transform, and applying the modified transform to one of (i) the first set of speech parameters, and (ii) the Lombard parameters to obtain the one or more speech parameters; and processing, by the text-to-speech module, a text to obtain the voice output corresponding to the text based on the one or more speech parameters to account for the one or more characteristics of the environment.