US Patent 9311912 Cost efficient distributed text-to-speech processing

Text-to-speech (TTS) processing systems may be divided among remote TTS servers which are accessible through a network connection to local user devices. The costs for performing processing on these servers may vary according to time. To improve efficiency of TTS processing certain requests may be scheduled during low cost server times. A user may indicate a preference for such low cost delivery. A user may also indicate a preference for quick turnaround time, permitting scheduling of TTS processing during higher cost server times. A TTS processing system may also consider quality of TTS results when scheduling server processing time for a particular TTS request and may allocate more server time when higher quality results are desired.