What is the CSLU Toolkit?

Well, this little kit of freeware is quite remarkable. It is a compilation of different programs that combine to create a package that allows you to create a speech dialogue interface with your computer.

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.

Downloading and Installing the CSLU Toolkit

Important Notes about Installing:

1. The software installation requires an active internet connection.
2. You will need to register before installing this software.
3. The CSLU Toolkit currently runs under Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, 2000, XP Home and XP Professional on Intel (or compatible) processors only.
4. If installing under Windows NT/2000/XP you need to do so with an account that has administrative privileges.

To Install Follow these Steps

Step 1

Connect to the Internet.

If you are using a computer that is on a network then make sure that you log into it using Administrator access. If you are unsure of what this is then ask your Computer Systems Administrator or Technical Support for help.

Registration
Click Here and fill in your email address to register for your licence. Make sure it is an email that you can immediately access as you need to do so in Step 2.

Installing this program requires two files. The first will be emailed to you, the second file is contained on this CD.

Step 2

Check the email address you used for registering for a new email from Speech Toolkit. Open the email.

Once you've registered you will be emailed a unique Speech Toolkit serial number in a file called "SpeechToolkit.reg". This serial number is associated with your email address. Use it to install the software on any number of machines.

Download the first file as directed in the email and open it.

Click "Yes" to enter the registration code into the Windows registry.
The installation program needs this registration code. It will send you back to the registration page if steps 1 and 2 above have not been followed.

Step 3

Click here to access the second file on this cd and then click "Open" to run the file.

Step 4

The installer establishes an HTTP connection (through a proxy, if configured) to the download server. The Speech Toolkit serial number is used in a database query to determine which table of contents to download.

Step 5

Modules selected from the table of contents are either retrieved from the installation disk or downloaded via HTTP in 1Mb chunks. If the download is interrupted and restarted archive chunks in the download directory will be checked for integrity. Ones that fail will this check be refetched and the installation process will continue. Once all the chunks for a module have been retrieved they are concatenated into a ZIP archive. If the "Download only" option was not selected, the module is extracted from the archive and installed in the target directory. If the "Remove archive files after installation" option was selected the archive is then deleted.

Step 6

The final module installed creates the required registry entries and file associations and populates the Start menu.

Licensing
The installer establishes a connection to our licensing server. A query containing the Speech Toolkit serial number (associated with the user) and a unique host ID (associated with the machine the installer is running on) returns a list of license keys that enable Speech Toolkit features.
The licensing step can be repeated by running the "Licensing" program from the "Speech Toolkit"->"Admin" Start menu entry.

For further information on using the CSLU toolkit see the Rapid Application Development Workshop

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