14 DAY TRIAL // Cortana, the digital personal assistant that Microsoft has made official alongside Windows Phone 8.1, its newest mobile OS flavor, is now expected to arrive in Canada before the end of this summer.
Only yesterday, info coming from Marcus Ash, group program manager for Cortana on Windows Phone, unveiled that the digital personal assistant was on its way to more markets out there, but no specific availability dates have been provided.
Apparently, Microsoft has seen great interest in Cortana overseas, despite the fact that the feature has only been announced online for the US as of now. Half of those who already use the functionality are outside the US.
Among the countries that where Cortana is most wanted, we can count Australia, Canada, India, Italy, Spain, the UK, and others, yet specific info on when it could arrive on these markets hasn’t been provided as of now.
A recent article on MobileSyrup, however, claims that Microsoft Canada’s President, Janet Kennedy, has confirmed that Cortana will be available in the country before the end of the summer.
It turns out that Microsoft was actually looking into fine-tuning the digital personal assistant before rolling it out to more countries, and that it might actually have it ready for deployment in Canada around the same time that Windows Phone lands in a final version.
He also demoed Cortana during a lunchtime keynote address, at the Canadian Telecom Summit. However, it’s still unclear when exactly the feature will be ready for deployment in the country, it seems.
On the other hand, we do know that Microsoft is hard at work expanding the availability of the feature to more markets and additional languages, as Marcus Ash said yesterday.
In a recent tweet, he also confirmed that the digital personal assistant would soon arrive in a Spanish version as well, and that the team was hard at work on this.
“And believe me, Joe is on me and the team about getting a Spanish version of #Cortana out as fast as we can,” he said in a tweet.
Unfortunately, no specific availability date has been provided as of now, but the good news is that they are actively working Cortana in Spanish, which suggests that some more consistent info will be unveiled soon.
Windows Phone 8.1 is currently available as a Developer Preview, yet Microsoft is expected to start deploying it on existing Windows Phone 8 handsets out there by the end of this month. Hopefully, more info on Cortana’s availability overseas will be provided at that time, so stay tuned.