Is it possible to hook a microphone/reciever device up to my computer and use software to make local/long distance calls through it?
http://www.dialpad.com among others… just run a google search…
all you need is your computer a mic and speakers. Hopefully headphones or you will get a horrible echo. Sound quality is not always great and sometimes there is a lag… but it works.
I once had a computer that came with a program called (if I recall correctly) Phoenix Voice Suite that turned the computer into a speaker phone, without any extra hardware. It worked okay and had all kinds of convenient features on it, like voice mail, but I ended up using a normal phone most of the time. I think you’d get better results, as Whammo suggested, with headphones instead of the speaker phone thing.
If anyone cares, make that Phoenix Telephony Suite.
For a little bit I could make free TTY calls on the net through ip-relay.com but it doesn’t seem up anymore.