Snoopaloop,
1. Text-to-Speech and the Microsoft Speech Technologies Platform
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms994644.aspx
Learn how Text-to-Speech has reached new heights of quality, which enables deployment of customer-facing speech applications that rely on it to support a pleasant user experience.
2. Text to Speech with the Microsoft Speech Library and SDK version 5.1
http://www.codeproject.com/vb/net/TTSinVBpackage.asp
This article describes an application used to exercise some of the Text To Speech features available to .NET developers through the Microsoft Speech 5.1 SDK. This article does not address the newer speech server related libraries, nor does it address web based deployments of speech related technologies.