Microsoft's Siri like voice assistant 'Cortana' coming to India with Windows Phone 8.1 update

Microsoft's personal and proactive virtual assistant called 'Cortana' is coming to India with the next Windows Phone 8.1 update, the company stated in an official Windows Phone blog post. It will be available to users in China and the UK with this update as a 'beta', in countries like Canada, Australia and India it will be offered as an 'alpha'.

While Cortana (nicknamed Xiao Na) would generally work the same way in China as the US and the rest of the world, the country did get some special features. She (Cortana) has an alternative form which has a different visual appearance, animations, and sounds, and supports Chinese (Mandarin) in voice, text, and speech. She also has specialised suggestions tuned specifically for people living in China.

Similarly, for the UK, Cortana has been tailored to support UK spellings and pronunciations and Bing-provided local data on sports teams (for the English Premier League), the London Stock Exchange, commuter conditions, and more. The voice and accent is local and Cortana's personality has also been tweaked to be more locally relevant.

In contrast, since it's an alpha launch in India, users in the country will not get any localised content, and you can also say goodbye to Indian English pronunciations. In fact, users will need to opt-in for the early adopter program, and even then they will only be able to try the voice assistant using English language models from the US and the UK.

"We know there has been a lot of enthusiasm about Cortana in many other markets, and we wanted to give more people the ability to start using Cortana. Therefore, we're also starting a new 'alpha' program in three countries- Canada, India, and Australia. This early adopter program will be opt-in and give people the ability to try Cortana using English language models from the US and the UK," wrote Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's corporate VP and manager for Windows Phone in an official blog post.

Other Windows Phone 8.1 updates include:

Live folders: Users can now organise their apps into folders on their Start screen. To create a Live Folder, just drag a tile over another tile and then name the folder. Open the folder to change the folder name and arrange and size the tiles however you want.

Xbox music: The Xbox Music app has been updated to deliver much better performance in areas like app load and list scrolling. From background sync of your collection, to swipe to advance, the product has been continually adding features in every two weeks for the past few months. And in the coming month, there will be a 'quickplay' of recent playback activities, and support for Kids Corner.

Store Live Tile: Enables users to see the latest info about the latest apps and games available in the Windows Phone Store through its Live Tile. If you have the Store pinned to your Start screen on your device, you'll get updates on the newest titles (refreshed every 6 hours) throughout the day.

Apps Corner: Users can also specify which apps are displayed in a special 'sandboxed' mode that restricts which apps are used. This feature is for businesses so they can allow access to select apps in cases where a full MDM solution isn't required. Apps Corner can also be used to boot straight to an app, or to setup retail demos.

The ability to select multiple SMS messages for deletion and forwarding has also been added with this update.