Of the 80 million households in America, about 97% have televisions, about 96% have telephones , and about 11% have access to the Internet. What barriers are preventing 70 million households from participating in cyberspace, and how can these be barriers be overcome? This article talks about how advances in human language technology can help overcome some of the barriers that prevent community participation in cyberspace. Human language technology refers to the set of technologies, such as speech recognition and speech synthesis that are used to create spoken language systems|systems that allow people to communicate with machines using speech. A signiicant advantage of using speech as an interface modality is that it can be transmitted by existing communications networks using common and inexpensive devices such as telephones and televisions. Today, use of the internet is limited to people with access to computers and the skills to use them. These requirements exclude a great many Americans: computers are too expensive for many of us to own, and about one third of our citizens are functionally illiterate (National Center for Education Statistics, 1993). In the future, computers are unlikely to be the major appliance for accessing the National Information Infrastructure; Telephones, cellular phones, televisions connected to cable networks and inexpensive information applicances are likely to become the preferred means of access.