1. A text-to-speech system comprising: at least one processor configured to; accept text input; provide synthetic speech output corresponding to the text input; accept instruction for at least one emotion-based paradigm wherein the instruction adapts the at least one processor to accept at least one emoticon-based command from a user interface that indicates at least one emotion to impart to speech synthesized from at least a portion of the text input; and apply the at least one emotion-based paradigm comprising: selecting at least one segment from a data store of audio segments, the selecting of the at least one segment being 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 input; and altering at least one prosodic pattern to be used in synthetic speech output based at least in part on the at least one emoticon-based command.