Patent ID: 8224647

Claim:
A method comprising: analyzing text within a body of a text instant message authored by an author 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 said author and comprise one or more voice synthesis control parameters which determine distinctive intelligible characteristics representative of the author, a subset of the text-to-speech synthesis control parameters associated with said author, 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 said subset of text-to-speech synthesis control parameters to a recipient user's device, the subset of text-to-speech synthesis control parameters being attached to the text instant message; receiving said text instant message along with said subset of text-to-speech synthesis control parameters by said recipients user's device; and at said recipient user's device, performing text-to-speech synthesis of the text instant message according to said 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 said distinctive intelligible characteristics representative of said author.