Microsoft Announces Update for Windows Phone 8.1, Cortana coming to India and other markets

Back in April at the BUILD 2014 conference, Microsoft made the official announcement of Windows Phone 8.1 and was made available as developer preview few weeks later. Windows Phone 8.1 final version (along with Cyan update) is being rolled out to users across the world. Now, the company has announced the first update to Windows Phone 8.1 and brings in several changes.

The major change in the update is for Cortana which will be available for people in China and the UK with this update as a “beta” and in Canada, India, and Australia as an “alpha”.

In China, Cortana will be nicknamed “Xiao Na”. For China Cortana has an alternative form which has a different visual appearance, animations, and sounds. She supports Chinese (Mandarin) in voice, text, and speech. She also has specialized suggestions tuned specifically for people living in China, like air quality information in weather cards, information about driving restrictions, and the ability to track local TV shows and celebrities. She can look up English words in the Bing Dictionary for people looking to brush up on their English.

Cortana will be rolled out in new “alpha” program in three countries: Canada, India, and Australia. This early adopter program will be opt-in and give people the ability to try Cortana using English language models from the US and the UK.

Apart from this, you can now organize your apps into folders on your Start screen. Live Folders as it is called is simple to create as well, just drag a tile over another tile and then name the folder. Open the folder to change the folder name and arrange and size the tiles however you want.

Along with this, there is also update to Xbox Music app to deliver much better performance in areas like app load and list scrolling. It’s also brought back features that were missing in the Windows Phone 8.1. From background sync of your collection, to swipe to advance, the product has been continually adding features in every two weeks for the past few months.

If you have the Store pinned to your Start screen on your phone then you’ll get updates on the newest titles refreshed every 6 hours and it is streamed dynamically to you throughout your day.

With the new update, the company has also added the ability to select multiple SMS messages for deletion and forwarding, making it easier to manage your text messages.

There is also a new Apps Corner where you can specify which apps are displayed in a special “sandboxed” mode (like a protected Start screen) that restricts which apps are used. This feature is for businesses so they can allow access to select apps in cases where a full MDM solution isn’t required. Apps Corner can also be used to boot straight to an app.

If you’re already on the Windows Phone 8.1 Preview for Developers then this update should be rolling out next week. The Windows Phone 8.1 Update will roll out to consumers with devices running Windows Phone 8.1 in the coming months.