Patent ID: 8428952

Claim:
A method comprising: analyzing text within a body of a first user's text instant message to determine text-to-speech synthesis control parameters that are to be used to produce a synthesized audible representation of the text within the body of the text instant message; extracting, from text-to-speech synthesis control parameters that are associated with the first user and comprise one or more voice synthesis control parameters which determine distinctive intelligible characteristics representative of the first user, a subset of the text-to-speech synthesis control parameters associated with the first user, the subset corresponding to the text-to-speech synthesis control parameters determined during the analyzing as those that are to be used to produce the synthesized audible representation of the text within the body of the text instant message; sending the text instant message along with the subset of text-to-speech synthesis control parameters to a second user's device, the subset of text-to-speech synthesis control parameters being attached to the text instant message; receiving the text instant message along with the subset of text-to-speech synthesis control parameters by the second user's device; and at the second user's device, performing text-to-speech synthesis of the text instant message according to the subset of text-to-speech synthesis control parameters to produce the synthesized audible representation of the text within the body of the text instant message having the distinctive intelligible characteristics representative of the first user.