Patent ID: 8170877

Claim:
A method for producing speech data from content from any one of a plurality of applications, the method comprising: in response to a print command, received from a user operating a computing device via a print interface accessed via one of the plurality of applications, to print the content, displaying a graphical user interface on a display of the computing device that provides a first option of outputting the content via a printer that is separate from the computing device and a second option of outputting the content via a text-to-speech output device capable of responding to the print command, the text-to-speech output device comprising a driver compatible with and configured to obtain the content via the print interface and a text-to-speech engine capable of converting text to speech, the print interface being generic to the plurality of applications; displaying via the graphical user interface on the display of the computing device information identifying at least one user configurable setting of the text-to-speech output device; in response to the user of the computing device altering the at least one user configurable setting via the graphical user interface, adjusting a corresponding operational parameter of the text-to-speech output device; in response to the user selecting, via the print interface, the text-to-speech output device to output the content, receiving, by the driver, the content provided by the print interface and conveying, by the driver, at least a portion of the content to the text-to-speech engine; automatically converting the portion of the content to speech data using the text-to-speech engine; and outputting the speech data.