Bringing spoken language systems to the classroom

Currently, there are few opportunities for people t o learn about and experiment with the latest spoken languag e technology. Furthermore, most research and developm ent activities are restricted to a handful of academic and industrial labs. In order to make the technology le ss exclusive, it must become more accessible to the ge n ral population. This is now feasible with the developme nt of the CSLU Toolkit which combines easy-to-use authori ng tools with state-of-the-art human language technolo gy. In this paper, we focus on the educational role of the toolkit and describe how it is being used in several local schools.