A quick glance through the voice samples of the Kinect shows the Microsoft.Speech namespace. Great, get it working and test a few things out. Fire up some documentation on how to use the Synthesizer, set to default audio and crash. Quick further check, apparently you should be dumping the stream to a SoundPlayer and playing that way. Zero size stream, hrmm.
Turns out all you really need is one of these http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27224
Using System.Speech you'll get Microsoft Anna when running GetInstalledVoices(), but nothing when using Microsoft.Speech. Yup, you're missing a voice.
Some of them are a bit hit and miss. Anna isn't very fluid at all, en-GB_Hazel can't say my wifes name yet en-US_ZiraPro can. Oh well. I now know how to do both direct audio output and to a stream for sending somewhere, such as a notification via a custom Lync client.
Speech recognition itself with the grammar builder file is quite nice. I can see myself spending some time building a query/response/action library for automating small activities such as queuing up the latest episode of something (why yes, I mean on youtube, of course), checking for patches for DayZ and download/extract to location, look at my RSS lists and bring new items to my attention and read them out. Having a new small human means this type of thing would really help (and can leverage my non-iDevice environment and actual computing power with ease of customisation).
No further work done on any Kinect projects though. The Lync project I have is almost at a decent beta phase, all the questions from my testing earlier this week have answers now, thanks to a few chats with two very smart chaps at work. The main part left is a decent configuration system and wiring the client to look them all up.
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