In delivering text-to-speech (TTS) results to a user, the time between the user request and delivery of initial TTS results is reduced using one or more of various techniques. Caching of TTS results may be reconfigured to cache unit indices rather than full speech synthesis results. More powerful computing resources may be dedicated to early TTS processing. A user may be notified of TTS results prior to complete processing of a TTS request. Early TTS processing may be performed by a local device and then passed to a remote device.