Elmo Knows Your Name is a toy that you customize specifically for your child. I had a hard time finding reviews and information about the options, how it worked, and whether it was actually any good or not. So that's the purpose of this guide - to give you all of that information from someone who actually owns it and knows the positive and negatives of it.

I bought the Elmo Knows Your Name for my daughter for Christmas (she was 20 months) rather than the TMX Elmo because I thought this would be more interactive for her, and I loved that it said her name. She's a huge Elmo fanatic and even spots Elmo on the diaper packages in the grocery store. So I thought this was the perfect product for her.

I was a little concerned because I'd read reviews that said the uploading software was clunky or just didn't work. I couldn't find anything that said if it would or wouldn't work with Vista, so I bit the bullet and tried it anyway. Success!! The CD it came with worked just fine. It was incredibly easy to get the selections uploaded into the doll even on Vista (I'm using Vista Home Premium). So no problems there. I was a little disappointed with the limitations of the choices though. You can select up to three total of the selection of songs, stories and games:

SONGS
Elmo's Birthday Song
Sunny Days (Sesame Street Theme Song)
Elmo's ABCs (the ABC song)
Friend's Forever
Goodnight Friend **If this Elmo doll only sung this song I would still be happy. It's really good, and my daughter loves it.

STORIES
Elmo's Colorful Day
What Do You Like To Eat?
Elmo's Alphabet Adventure
Hide and Seek on Sesame Street
Elmo and the 1-2-3 Bear

GAMES
Who Am I?
Animal Antics
Rhyming Riddles
Elmo's Silly Sounds
Elmo's Number Game

In addition to this, you can customize it by selecting up to three names of people your child knows (friends, family members, etc.), as well as items he likes to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, favorite drink, favorite animal and color. You don't have to do any of this if you don't want to.

This information will be plucked out by Elmo saying "Andrew loves toast, Elmo does too!" and phrases like that.

The stories include your child's name and some of the selections you've made too. I was a little disappointed with how Elmo talks. It's not like you're used to on the shows. It's very jumpy and the intonation is way off. It's like they recorded each word individually and then put them together into sentences later, so it doesn't flow well at all. It's very distracting in the stories, particularly when he pauses each time before saying your child's name. The phrases about foods, colors, etc are a little better though.

My solution was to just not put any of the stories on. The songs are recorded like you're used to hearing them, and those are wonderful. I just picked three songs rather than any of the other options. It would be nice to have more songs to choose from, and have more than three total selections.

There are a couple of features that I haven't used. They are the daily planner (from what I understand it prompts your child at lunch time, nap time, etc. which are at times you select. I can only assume it has some kind of time sensor in it to do that). The other feature is the birthday countdown. This counts down the days to your child's birthday. I will be trying this out as we get closer to her birthday, but I haven't tried it yet. So I can't comment on those two features.

All in all, I do like this doll. I love the songs, and I love that it greets her by name. It's nice and plush for her to hug (and has an off-switch if you need it!!) I would give it about an 8 out of 10 because I think they could have done the voice recording much better. I understand the need for the breaks before saying the child's name, but the rest of it could have been recorded much smoother.

I do think it is a little overpriced too. The concept is excellent and if they'd executed it really well, the $54.99 retail I paid would have been well spent. But since it's a bit jumpy on the speech, and you only get three selections for the songs, stories and games, I would think $39.99 would be more appropriate. I think it is a good product and I would buy it again, but I don't think it would have been the "big present" for Christmas that I tried to make it. Still, worth the money if you can get a good deal (hey, this is eBay!)