14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just announced that Windows Phone personal assistant Cortana will become available in France, Italy, Germany, and Spain later today, but only for devices enrolled in the Windows Phone Developer Preview program.
Cortana, which is currently available on Windows Phone exclusively but will soon arrive on the desktop as well, was already offered to users in the United States, China, and the United Kingdom in the form of a beta product.
In all these new countries, however, Cortana will actually be introduced as an alpha, which is probably the main indication that you shouldn’t expect the personal assistant to come with the full-feature package.
Microsoft itself notes in today’s announcement that a number of features might be missing in these countries, but it’s working hard right now to make them available in all markets where Cortana is already offered to users.
Feedback still required
Microsoft says that making Cortana available in these countries only for devices participating in the Preview for Developers program was critical because the company needs feedback in order to improve all features and push the personal assistant out of alpha stage as soon as possible.
“We need help from the community to use and speak to Cortana in order to improve the speech and language recognition models for each of the new languages,” Microsoft says.
One of the features not yet available in France, Italy, Germany, and Spain is the flight tracking service, while transit data can only be used in large cities. The company, however, promises to improve them when more data is collected.
What’s great, on the other hand, is that Cortana will perfectly adapt to the European market, and although part of the alpha development stage, it will also display European football stats, with support for the most popular championships, including Seria A, Ligue 1, La Liga, and Bundesliga.
On its way to the desktop too
Cortana will soon arrive on the desktop as well, with Microsoft working hard to make this feature available for Windows 10 users right on their PCs.
At this point, Cortana is only in its incipient stages on the desktop, but a future consumer preview build of Windows 10 is expected to bring a testing version of this feature in an attempt to give users the possibility of trying it out and sending feedback to the company.
Windows 10 is expected to debut in mid-2015, so Microsoft should have enough time to fix all problems reported by users who install the consumer preview.
