I dont really do music games so i do not know. But you can use kinect in place of a headset for voice chatting in games. It has a good mic set up as far as  i know

They had lips some years ago which was pretty good when kareoke games was IN.

But I have to say that I am loving that low latency, reason I hated kinect even as navigation was that it had a lot of latency when moving around on the dashboard and hopefully this fixes it.

Other than that I am looking forward to hear what Ubisoft will do with Kinect in the next Rainbow Six, we know Ghost recon had the Gunsmith thing, Splinter cell will have  voice commands and the obvious feature would be to have voice commands in Rainbow Six too but I want to see some suprises.

Isn't that why the microphones inside the kinect are noise cancelling microphones(via software modifications)? At least that works on the kinect SDK to some degree

Edit: Kinect and sound

Kinect comes with a group of four microphones (microphone array) that capture sound at very high quality. Indeed, directly on the sensor, a signal processor (DSP) is used to remove background noise and cancel echo effects.

Moreover, thanks to its group of microphones, Kinect can provide the direction of the recorded sound source (beamforming). Then it becomes possible to know who is speaking in a meeting for example.

I still don't get how it can read your heartrate.

Nothing new here. The improvements are mainly in software.

The most important part of the specs for judging how much better Kinect 2 is compared to Kinect 1 (meaning the actual hardware, not some software-library running on the console) is the depth resolution.

Unfortunately, that's exactly the part of the Kinect 2 specs that Microsoft has for some reason so far not released any information about.
, one would have to know the resolution of the depth sensor - but for some reason

it's probably like those machines at the gym, it tries to intelligently guess your heartrate. Unless there is something you're touching on having on, there is no way it can read you heartrate accurately.

Pretty much what we knew. Now waiting for the PS Eye to be detailed, and I really hope it can compete or at least does something special.

it will, 99,99% sure... PS eye (never used it myself but read about it) uses a 4 mic array and can do noise cancelation and can be used in singstar... so it is almost impossible that kinect won't do it...

the heart beat can be estimated by age, weight, gender, and breath. maybe kinect can "see" your chest inflate and defalte and with that calculate the heart beat.

I've read in an article that they are planing for the xbone to eventually be able to "talk" back to you. On the bottom of kinect 2.0 is that a speaker or microphone?

the size of your... uh, forget it