I have a Million dollar idea...?

Your best bet would be to retain a patent attorney and discuss the invention with him/her. The patent attorney will then perform a "prior art search" to determine whether anything has been published that discloses your invention. If there are no such publications, the attorney will then draft a patent application with a narrative description of your invention and a set of "claims" that are written in dense legalese (or patentese, if you will).

After about 18 months, the prosecution begins. A patent examiner will issue an "office action" that cites various publications that arguably disclose your invention. Your attorney will then argue back and forth with the examiner and may define your invention more narrowly in order to overcome the examiner's assertions. Once the examiner is satisfied that there is no publication that discloses your invention, he/she will allow the patent application.

I have to be honest, the process is a LOT more complex than this. What I've described is a very brief and watered down version. But if you have any more questions, ask me at www.patentqanda.com (my patent question and answer blog). I'm a licensed patent attorney willing to help out at no charge.

Forget the patent until you find out if there is a demand for the product.

It is dead simple to find out these days before you start investing dollars into something that may not sell.

The easiest way is to use the net, go to Yahoo buzz or search the idea, find out how many people are in that industry.

Go to google keyword research and you will find out how many searches per month take place for any keyword related to your idea.

If there are no or little searches there may be no demand.

Create a book-on-tape type machine that would read a story in the voice of a child's parent. So, when I child wants to be read a bed time story, the parent could pop in a tape (or a memory stick type thing) into the machine and the machine would tell the story to child, freeing the parent to do better things with their time (have a night cap or watch re-runs of Myth Busters). Initially, the parent would have to speak several phrases into the machine until the machine could mimic the voice of the parent accurately. For an additional price, the parent could send in pictures of their head to company, and the company would create a machine that looked like the parents head. That way the parent could park their head next to their child's bed stand. The talking head would help the child to bond with their parent. Perhaps program the head to be able to ask questions to the kid about the story.

Check out the web site for the United Inventors Association, www.uiausa.com.

Also read the book "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cashing In on Your Inventions" by Richard C. Levy.

You don't.

Ideas can't be patented.