The CHILDES system provides tools for studying conversational interactions. These tools include a database of transcripts, programs for computer analysis of transcripts, methods for linguistic coding,and systems for linking transcripts to digitized audio and video.

TalkBank is an interdisciplinary research project funded by a 5-year grant entitled "TalkBank: A Multimodal Database of Communicative Interactions" from the National Science Foundation (BCS-998009, KDI, SBE) to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania. Additional support comes from NSF ITR Grant 0324883.

The goal o TalkBank is to foster fundamental research in the study of human and animal communication. It will construct sample databases within each of the subfields studying communication. It will use these databases to advance the development of standards and tools for creating, sharing, searching, and commenting upon primary materials via networked computers.