I did not realize I missed a couple of conversions when I migrated the Bot to this new environment... As a consequence you could have been seeing a lot of question marks in the middle of the sentences. It should be fixed now - my bad.

On the good news front I got a decent SAPI TTS voice to replace Microsoft Sam. I also got a Spanish female voice, so I hope I can get it up soon as well. it took me a while to find the correct way to set different voices using SAPI, so here's the code in case someone is looking for a similar solution:

(assuming voiceDesc is the name of the voice to be used)

SpeechStreamFileMode spFileMode = SpeechStreamFileMode.SSFMCreateForWrite;
SpFileStream spFileStream = new SpFileStream();
spFileStream.Open(filename, spFileMode, false);

SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags spFlags = SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFlagsAsync;
SpVoice Voice = new SpVoice();

// select the right voice for this session
foreach (SpeechLib.SpObjectToken aVoice in Voice.GetVoices("", ""))
{
    if (aVoice.GetDescription(0).StartsWith(voiceDesc))
    {
        Voice.Voice = aVoice;
        break;
    }
}

Voice.AudioOutputStream = spFileStream;
Voice.Speak(local, spFlags);
Voice.WaitUntilDone(10000);
spFileStream.Close();

Eu nao percebi que quando migrei o sistema para esse novo servidor eu deixei de incluir algumas conversoes. O erro deve ter gerado um monte de traducoes com pontos de interrogacao no meio dos textos - foi mal.

Pra compensar, comprei duas vozes TTS - uma para Ingles (US) e outra para Espanhol. Ja' instalei a voz para Ingles, que e' MIL vezes melhor que o Microsoft Sam. Eu tive dificuldade em encontrar o jeito correto de chavear entre vozes, entao pra facilitar a vida de quem esta' com o mesmo problema segue um snippet do codigo ai em cima.