I have a website which I want to allow a teacher in realtime to communicate to a pupil. So the application has to connect to the users microphone if they allow it. If the user has no headset then I want to allow the teacher to use a simple text chat. Flash seemed to be the way to go here but I need to pay for Flash Media Server too which has incredible costs. Even the hosted options are extremely expensive. Is there any cheaper way to achieve what I am looking for? If I can avoid using external applications it would be great.
Thanks