Waiting for Cortana? Microsoft's voice assistant won't come to India till 2015

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8.1 has a new feature that everyone is talking about. Cortana, the voice assistant, is being talked about as a possible competitor to Apple’s Siri and Google Now.   However the product rollout for Cortana will be quite slow. According to Microsoft’s official blog post, “Cortana be available soon in the US in beta, then will launch in the US the UK and China in the second half of 2014, with other countries to follow in 2015."    Since India is not mentioned in the list, it’s safe to assume that Cortana will not be available in Indian versions of Lumia phones till 2015. That does seem like a long wait for a new feature, which is one of the highlights of the updated OS.   The reasons for delay of this remain unknown but it’s unlikely that Cortana has a product has been fully tested given that it is being launched in beta mode first. Additionally Microsoft could be working on ensuring that Cortana can efficiently recognize different accents as well as languages by the time they release it out for everyone.   The name for Cortana comes from the game Halo, where Cortana is an artificial intelligence being, which guides the Master Chief.   As far as the Voice-assistant is concerned, it will rely on Bing Search for showing results. It will appear as a hollow ring on the phone when it has something to say to the user and it can even express a few ‘emotions’ when that’s called for. Cortana can be animated and happy when your favourite team wins or sad when they have had a bad day on field.   Cortana will try to get information about the user, their likes, etc, will ask for access to user email, messages etc. Users can decide which information should be shared with Cortana, which will be stored in a Notebook. The Notebook is easily editable so you can add or remove entries as and when you please. You can find out more about Cortana here.