"Hey Cortana" Outside America

millermk

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Nov 15, 2012
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Just a note for those of us not lucky enough to live in America and get features, "Hey Cortana" isn't available in Canada officially, and presumably isn't available in some other places as well. However, after flashing the Finland Denim ROM onto my 1520 a while back, I switched my region, display, and speech language to en-us to try out "Hey Cortana". It worked normally then, and I had a but of fun but I wanted to set my phone back to Canadian region. So I set everything back to Canada and decided to forget about passive activation. Anyway today I said hey Cortana because I was trying it out on my computer, and my phone lit up. Turns out that it still works once my region is set to Canada even though it says its off in settings.

Tldr: If Hey Cortana isn't available in your region, switch all your region and language settings to English/American, turn on hey Cortana (and train it for your voice if you'd like), then switch back to your own region without turning the feature off.
 

xtremez

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Nov 13, 2012
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I'm in Malaysia, and i left my region as United States. But "Hey Cortana" doesn't seem to work like "Ok, Google".
 

deebee_433

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Dec 20, 2013
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Haha. I did exactly this not even 10 minutes ago and it works. It's a hacky workaround considering Canada and Australia are predominantly English speakers, but I've learned to --in the words of Adam Orth-- deal with it. :)
 

Lumiana

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I didn't download my old restore back up. I done it like it was my 1st time so that may be why I got it in the system settings
 

Pete

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Nov 12, 2012
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I used my previous backup and Hey Cortana came up immediately after restoring the backup and waiting for the apps to be installed.
 

xtremez

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What device are you using? The one i'm using a Lumia 535, i think is not country specific so the same device in SG should be the same. Unless you're using an another device that was is pending upgrade then it might take awhile. Our region is an iOS and Android stronghold. :p
 

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