Enable Cortana from outside a supported region

[tejazz]

Hi there,
I live in India and after installing Windows 10 yesterday, and found that Cortana is not available in my region yet.

I've tried changing all of the following to United States/US English and restarting my PC, but the option to enable/disable Cortana is still greyed out in the search bar settings.
- Region
- Keyboard
- Speech
- Language
- Time Zone
- Bing settings (from website)

Anyone from outside a supported region successfully enable Cortana yet?

 

[ericmackrodt]

Same problem here. Updated Windows 8.1 Pro in Portuguese-Brazilian to Windows 10 Pro in Portuguese-Brazilian then changed EVERYTHING to English (United States). I mean, I'm 100% sure I changed everything, looked at many posts on the web, tried everything and I can't get Cortana to work!!
My Windows is 110% en-US now.
Do you think that maybe it's because the installation was originally in Portuguese?
I'm a bit frustrated with this, my Windows Phone was in Portuguese then I changed it to English and Cortana worked perfectly.

 

[tejazz]

Do you think that maybe it's because the installation was originally in Portuguese?

Exactly what I was thinking. Maybe Windows Update sensed that I was in an unsupported region, and did not download the Cortana component of the Windows 10 OS. I wonder if reinstalling from the ISO might fix it, but I'm too lazy to go through that amount of hassle.

 

[jojoe42]

Exactly what I was thinking. Maybe Windows Update sensed that I was in an unsupported region, and did not download the Cortana component of the Windows 10 OS. I wonder if reinstalling from the ISO might fix it, but I'm too lazy to go through that amount of hassle.

You need to go to Update & Recovery > Windows Update > Optional Features and make sure you download the speech recognition package for English US. Make sure all your other settings are in check and then reboot! I changed regions on my en-nz install to get Cortana on my SP2 successfully and that was what I missed before

 

[ericmackrodt]

Do you mean "Update & Security"?
There's no Optional Features there, only Advanced Options.
Also, I've downloaded the speech recognition in en-US.

 

[tejazz]

You need to go to Update & Recovery > Windows Update > Optional Features and make sure you download the speech recognition package for English US. Make sure all your other settings are in check and then reboot! I changed regions on my en-nz install to get Cortana on my SP2 successfully and that was what I missed before

Just like joejoe42, I didn't find Optional Features under Windows Update, but a search for it showed that it was in System > Apps and Features > Manage Optional Features. However, all the English US and UK speech, ocr, handwriting, and text-to-speech features were already installed.

I then tried setting everything to English UK (no restart), and the option to enable Cortana was no longer grayed out! I then enabled Hey Cortana and everything, but it appears that the UK version of Cortana doesn't do any nifty things like singing a song, telling a joke, etc., but instead opens up the browser with search engine results of whatever was recognized.

Wonder why the same steps aren't working for US Cortana, though.

 

[tejazz]

[...] the UK version of Cortana doesn't do any nifty things like singing a song, telling a joke, etc., [...]

Weird, these started working after some time. However, UK Cortana sounds less 'fun' than Jen Taylor's Cortana -- especially the impressions -- but maybe it's just me.

 

[ericmackrodt]

I tried setting everything to English UK, didn't work. So I downloaded the ISO in English (US), reinstalled Windows and it worked.
This shouldn't be necessary, Microsoft really dropped the ball here.

 

[Allissey]

Strange, changed from Lumia 930 to Lumia 950 with backup: Cortana worked with changing region language settings. Last week had to completely reinstall windows 10 without backup due to other errors: those errors are gone, but can't get Cortana to work anymore with all region and language settings properly set. Annoying. Followed all suggestions above. Anybody a clue what could do the trick?