...but it would be cool to get it to be more personalized, It can trigger an even when you walk in the room but not for other people and know that it's you when you ask it questions. That kind of stuff would be very cool.
I don't think the 1.5 api for kinect offers this functionality. It does not do facial recognition or voice recognition as far as I know. It can apparently do face tracking, but that is not the same thing. Of course software exists for both facial and voice recognition, but it is true that this is beyond my ability!
Of course you can introduce yourself with a "catch phrase". Each person can have their own catch phrase, without actually saying their name. I could say "hiya hot stuff" and it would know it was me, and not my wife.
If it works well the facial tracking could be very useful. For one thing, it could only listen when it was able to recognize a face that was looking directly at it. If it is accurate enough this would work really well. I don't much like any of the kinect tracking though because it puts too much stress on the CPU which is generally not a good thing for an htpc that is running for long periods of time. It creates heat, wastes electricity, and potential makes your system less responsive, and could potentially even cause problem with playing video if your system is not powerful enough.
I did not look at the new api yet but I think it still lacks the ability to do dictation, or to learn your accent, which is pretty lame.