The CSLU Toolkit was created to provide the basic framework and tools for people to build, investigate and use interactive language systems. These systems incorporate leading-edge speech recognition, natural language understanding, speech synthesis and facial animation technologies. The toolkit provides a comprehensive, powerful and flexible environment for building interactive language systems that use these technologies, and for conducting research to improve them.

Because of the Toolkit's easy to use graphical authoring tools, it has spread from the halls of higher education into homes, primary and secondary schools. People who are currently using the Toolkit range from fifth-graders who create school projects to university professors who are experimenting with core language technologies and spoken dialogue systems.

To serve our wide range of users, we've split our documentation into several areas. The Users area focuses on building spoken dialog applications using the toolkit's graphical authoring environment and introduces the animated character Baldi. The Developer area focuses on the underlying toolkit libraries, application development using Tcl/TK and the C programming levels of the Toolkit. In the Researchers section, you'll find a variety of mini-courses that provide in-depth exposure to advanced topics in spoken dialog systems.

If you've just downloaded the Toolkit and have no idea where to start, the Users area is a good place to visit.