A method and an apparatus of synthesizing speech from a piece of input text 104. In one embodiment, the method includes the steps of retrieving the input text 104 entered into a computing system, and transforming the input text 104 based on the semantics 152 of at least one word of the input text 104 to generate a formatted text 108 for speech synthesis. The transforming includes adding an audio rendering effect tot he input text based on the semantics of at least one work, the audio rendering effect comprising background music, special effect sounds, and context-sensitive sounds. In another embodiment, the transformation also depends on at least one characteristic of the person listening to the speech output 118. In yet another embodiment, the transformation further depends on at least one characteristic of the hardware employed by the user to listen to the speech output 118. The transformed text can be further modified to fit a text-to-speech engine to generate the speech output 118.