30. The system of claim 18 , wherein the computing device comprises a mobile phone, tablet computing device, media consumption device, electronic book reading device, or a mobile computing device.
18. A system comprising: a computing device comprising one or more processors, the one or more processors programmed by specific executable instructions to at least: receive a first request to generate a first audio representation of a first text; determine, based at least on a first characteristic of the computing device, to use a local text-to-speech module to generate the first audio representation; generate the first audio representation using the local text-to-speech module; receive a second request to generate a second audio representation of a second text; determine, based at least on a second characteristic of the computing device, to use a remote text-to-speech system to generate the second audio representation; send request data based at least in part on the second text to the remote text-to-speech system; and receive the second audio representation from the remote text-to-speech system.