How to Enable Cortana on your Windows Phone 8.1 (Outside US)
Cortana, the most amazing feature of Windows Phone 8.1 is right now in beta and restricted to US only. There is a clear logic on why Microsoft has done it but then it doesn’t stop one to try it for features that can work on phone e.g. Setting up a reminder and so on. That said, if you are outside US and want to enable Cortana on your phone, you can do it by enabling regional settings on your phone.
Warning: You are about to change Regional Setting of your phone
Follow the steps as below:
1. Change Language Settings: Pull down the notification centre by swiping down and tap on the All Settings. Navigate to Language and install the US. This will download and post that, you will be prompted to restart, Postpone it for now.
Video Tutorial:
2.Change the region : In the settings page, look for REGION. Change this to United States. Make sure to keep the “Match phone language” option under Regional Format.
3. Re-check settings for Region, Speech and Speech: Check these again and restart your phone. When you do that, there will be a quick migration of few things. Don’t give a lot of thought to it.
After restart, hit the search button and you should see Cortana right up. Try out few commands and it should work nicely. The speech or the accent for other countries is not a problem for Cortana as long as you speak English. It was picking Indian accent pretty well.
What if Cortana Still doesn’t Work ?
If you still see the Bing page, cross check if you have local count enabled. That will be an extra icon on the Bing menu bar. This confirms that you have US settings, probably you had missed few things.
In case it still doesn’t work, go to Settings > Applications and see if Cortana is listed. If it’s listed, there is something wrong with your settings. Good thing is Cortana will be able to tell you what is wrong. Like in my case, I had my speech settings that was missing. It clearly said that “Cortana can only work if your speech language matches your display language”. You can directly open and configure so.
