Thank you for your response on this, Perry_S.  I guess I'll have to wait until the next Windows Update to see if it clears up the problem.

Microsoft broke their speech recognition - it’s very unfortunate because many are suffering from the issue. We don’t even know what they did that caused the issue and have been trying to figure out a work around. At this time the only advice we have is to wait for Microsoft’s fix

Thanks for expanding on the seriousness of the problem, DJ.

DJ,  Are you using the commands for Microsoft Speech Platform 11 ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/input/speech-recognition ) or are you still using the SAPI 5.4 format commands ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11935533/c-sharp-sapi-5-4-languages )?  I am wondering if Microsoft finally ended support for SAPI without announcing it.  It hasn't been updated since Windows 7.

ARC is using the System.Speech namespace. The namespace you linked to is for UWP, which is universal windows platform - a different flavor of the .Net eco-system and incompatible. There's no way they could discontinue System.Speech, because everything using Speech is built on it that isn't UWP.

Thanks for clarifying.  Surprisingly difficult to research speech on Windows 10.

Ya it’s super difficult - and Microsoft has figured out how to trick google to have old articles appear as new. I searched for system.speech recognition not working, and a bunch of articles showed up saying 5 days ago. But the article was dated 2007...

Because Microsoft tricks google to be on top with incorrect update time stamps, it’s impossible to find current messages on the subject.

I just got the same issue, windows 10 1803

No new hardware.

and no significant updates:

If the update list is correct ... I don't think is a major Windows Update fault...

I'll try to understand what is going on.