The articulatory synthesis program (ASY) was developed at Haskins Laboratories by Philip Rubin, Tom Baer, and Paul Mermelstein. It was based on a model of the vocal tract developed by Paul Mermelstein at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970's that he brought with him when he came to Haskins Laboratories in the mid-70s. In the late 1970's, Paul moved to Bell Northern Research in Montreal, Canada. He is now retired and living in Florida. Tom Baer is in the Auditory Perception Group in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge.

The interface aspects of ASY were provided by Philip Rubin, at Haskins Laboratories, during the late 1970s. Others who contributed heavily during this period include Tom Baer, Patrick Nye, Charles Marshall, Steven B. Davis, Arthur Abramson, and Lenny Szubowicz.

During the 1980s, ASY became part of a larger modeling project (the Haskins Gestural Computational Model). Contributors to this project and other aspects of enhanced ASY development include Louis Goldstein, Cathe Browman, Richard McGowan, Elliot Saltzman, Philip Rubin, Mark Tiede, Caroline Smith, Ignatius Mattingly, Vance Maverick, Vincent Gulisano, Michael Anstett, Bill Scully, and Michael D'Angelo.

CASY (the Configurable ASY program) was designed and developed by Louis Goldstein, Mark Tiede, and Philip Rubin. Related MRI images (including the image of Cathi Best on the ASY Demo page), were parts of experiments run by Cathe Browman, Louis Goldstein, and their colleagues.

Other MRI images were gathered during experiments run by Mark Tiede, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson, and their colleagues when they were at the ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan.

This current ASY demo started as a HyperCard stack (HyperASY) developed by Philip Rubin in 1988 as a gift on the occasion of Al Liberman's retirement as President of Haskins Laboratories. Patrick Haggard and Richard Crane assisted with the design and development of HyperASY.