Brian Theado - 24Jan04 - With my 2 year old daughter I have used a cheap "boom style" microphone. It has a cord about 6 feet long and I typically attached it to one of my two laptop computers. Using a laptop is convenient because it can be moved to whereever your child wants to play with it. A picture similar to the microphone I have can be found at 1.

I bought the microphone seen at 2 for $10 for my 9 month old nephew. It has an 8 foot cord and my sister and brother-in-law only have a desktop computer. I will report here on how well it works once I given it to him.

There is a very informative review at http://www.epinions.com/content_88665591428 about a USB microphone. It makes a good point about USB microphones immediately digitizing the sound at the microphone head. In my experience with a child and my analog microphone, any touching along the length of the microphone cord results in a pretty loud noise being played back. The USB microphone should be immune to such noise unless you actually touch the microphone itself. The USB microphone is more expensive than an analog microphone.

Brian Theado - 29May2005 - I just encountered a device that has interesting uses with the babbleback software. It is called chat cord - http://www.chatcord.com. It is a device that connects between any standard telephone and a PC's sound card. The telephone mouthpiece becomes the computer's microphone and the telephone's earpiece becomes the computer's speaker. No software or drivers necessary.

With a normal, corded telephone it may not be that useful. Maybe it would be good for teaching your child to talk on the phone. Or maybe if you like to talk to yourself on the telephone it would be fun. However, if you have a cordless telephone with speaker phone functionality (I have two of these), then it becomes interesting. Plug the base of the cordless phone into the computer, run the babbleback software, then carry cordless handset around the house. The handset becomes a portable, wire-free babbleback device.

Theoretically, there should be no problems with echo or feedback--when I use my cordless phone in speaker phone mode I have no such problems, so why would I when using it as a babbleback microphone/speaker setup?

I'm thinking of buying a chatcord and giving it a try. It is only $20 at http://voipstore.pulver.com (however the shipping cost is over $10 and I'm having second thoughts). If I do, then I'll report the results here.

Brian Theado - 02Jun2005 - I bought the chatcord and tried it out today. We have one cordless speaker phone (Panasonic) that is 3, maybe 4 years old and it didn't work so well. I couldn't turn the microphone volume settings on the computer up loud enough to hear the output very well. We have another cordless speaker phone set (vtech ev2625 3) that we bought last year and it worked great. It comes with two handsets and my daughter and I had one in two different rooms in our house. She went running from one room to the other hollering all the way. She is almost 4 years old now and she doesn't really play the "microphone game" much anymore. Today was the first time in a long while and it held her attention for a long time. I think it helped her phone skills, too. Afterwards she wanted to call her Gramma and she talked better on the phone than she has before.

There were some glitches with the phone. Sometimes it didn't pickup her voice even though it sounded like she was talking plenty loud enough. Overall, though, it was really fun.