When Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8.1 at BUILD Conference, nothing garnered more attention than the virtual assistant called Cortana. Several arguments were put forth how Windows Phone was rather late in making this move as Siri and Google Now are now established entities as a part of their OS. However, if the reaction on social media is to go by, then certainly everyone is looking forward to trying Cortana out now that the Developer Preview version of Windows Phone 8.1 is out.
However, as things stand, Cortana is available only for those in the US and you need to play a bit with your device to make sure Cortana is up and running on your Windows Phone 8.1 device. To do so, just follow the steps that are below:
Step 1
This is a bit of an obvious one, but make sure you have Windows Phone 8.1 installed on your device. For the moment, the update is available only to developer accounts, so make sure you have that and Windows Phone 8.1 up and running on your device to enable Cortana.
Step 2
Once you have WP 8.1 up and running, you will have to go into Settings, from there find ‘keyboard’ and download the English (US) keyboard. It is advisable to not have any other keyboard just to be on safe side.
Step 3
After you have done this, in Settings look for ‘language+region’ and change the language to English (US) and region to the United States.
Step 4
Now, head over to ‘Speech’ in Settings and change it to English (United States) and make sure its completely downloaded.
Step 5
You might want to change the region of your outlook account by visiting accounts.outlook.com to United States. Once you have done all these steps, Cortana is enabled automatically and you would see it appearing in your Application list, start the application from here for the first time.
After the first time, you simply need to now hit the Windows Search button of your device to see the assistant pop up and ready to be at your service.
Were you successful in running Cortana on your Windows Phone 8.1 device? How has been your experience with it so far? Do let us know in the comments section below or catch us on our Social Networking profiles.
Via: Unleashthephones