Cortana available in all regions?

[the_source]

Hi,

In the latest build I managed to enable Cortana while my region is set to Belgium and language is set to US English. Previously I had to set my region to a 'supported' region and match the language, i.e. region had to be set to USA and language too in order to get Cortana to work. That workaround however also meant that WM10 switched the store to the phone's region too.

Seems like this limitation is now gone. The first time I launched Cortana with region Belgium/language US English it did state that not all functionality might be available but up till now I haven't run into any limitation.

Anybody else noticed this?

Peter

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Hi,

In the latest build I managed to enable Cortana while my region is set to Belgium and language is set to US English. Previously I had to set my region to a 'supported' region and match the language, i.e. region had to be set to USA and language too in order to get Cortana to work. That workaround however also meant that WM10 switched the store to the phone's region too.

Seems like this limitation is now gone. The first time I launched Cortana with region Belgium/language US English it did state that not all functionality might be available but up till now I haven't run into any limitation.

Anybody else noticed this?

Peter

when you say the latest build, is this the threshold branch or the redstone branch?

 

[the_source]

sorry, redstone it is... build 14342.001

 

[Chintan Gohel]

sorry, redstone it is... build 14342.001

it would be nice if it could work for different regions but a certain language

 

[miarkus]

I just spotted it as well. I'm so glad they finally got rid of the regional restriction, surely we won't be getting all the benefits but that's a great start. So just to clarify you can enable Cortana as long as your phone language matches one of the available Cortana languages. Cool stuff.

 

[Mech0z]

This almost makes me jump to slow ring to get this good find!

 

[Hans Swolfs]

Reading this you just made my Sunday evening cheers fellow Belgian!!

 

[Gecinyuszi]

Good for you Belgian friends, but here in Hungary i don't have Cortana, even though i speak perfect English. So i guess it is only available for certain countries with US English setting without Native language support, for now. Anyone has an idea when Cortana will be released to Middle Europe for example ?

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Good for you Belgian friends, but here in Hungary i don't have Cortana, even though i speak perfect English. So i guess it is only available for certain countries with US English setting without Native language support, for now. Anyone has an idea when Cortana will be released to Middle Europe for example ?

so far there haven't been any rumours or news about Cortana launching in more countries. There was that beta program for a few countries a couple of years ago but that's it.

 

[Alberto Semenzato]

Sadly it suffers the very same limitation of Cortana tied to the device display language. I had a shake of heart when I first read this post, for a moment I thought they finally separated Cortana language from OS language.

An Example:
I'm in Italy but my OS display language is EN-US.
Previously I had set my region to United States to have Cortana available, in En-Us English.
Now I can set my region to Italy and still have Cortana available, but still in En-Us, by switching Cortana language to En-US.

You can't set Cortana language different than the OS display language yet, and for all those dual language speakers, it's a real mess. However, this trick seems to enable cross device syncing. Previously I wasn't able to find my phone (which region is set to Italy, with Italian display language, to have Italian Cortana for obvious voice control reasons) if I had my computer region set to United states. Now I can find it, and ring it from Cortana En-US itself on PC.

I don't know how many people here are in my situation, but i'm pretty sure i'm not the only dual language speaker in the world with this problem. Hopefully it's the first step to have a real multilingual Cortana.

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Cortana is still in the very first stages of development - there are hundreds of languages and Cortana will need to work with all or nearly all to satisfy users demands. Having it available in 12 countries only is seriously limiting but that can be used as a research opportunity to get things working properly