AsTeR has an Emacs front-end. Common Lisp is run as a sub-process of Emacs (version 18.59.1 or 19), using the Emacs ILISP interface.
Once the source code has been installed, AsTeR can be started up from within Emacs by executing M-x aster. This starts up a Common Lisp sub-process and loads in all of the code, compiling it if necessary. At this time, the voice synthesizer should be connected and powered on, since AsTeR communicates with the device when starting up to make sure that all is well. The user hears spoken messages as each module of AsTeR is successfully loaded.