Patent ID: 7966185

Claim:
A text-to-speech system comprising: an input to accept text; a user interface adapted to accept at least one emoticon-based command that indicates at least one emotion to impart to speech synthesized from at least a portion of the text; a segment selection and concatenation unit adapted to select a plurality of segments of speech from a database containing available segments for concatenation, the plurality of segments selected based at least in part on the at least one emoticon-based command to assist in imparting the at least one emotion to the speech synthesized from at least the portion of the text; and a prosody prediction unit to determine at least one prosodic pattern to be applied to at least some of the plurality of segments based, at least in part, on the at least one emoticon-based command to further assist in imparting the at least one emotion to generate expressive synthetic speech output using the plurality of segments.