If you live in Germany, Italy, France or Spain, you can now get your Cortana on. Microsoft today announced that it has rolled out its virtual, digital assistant to those four new European countries for users that are part of its Windows Phone Developer Preview Program.
In short, if you’re an early adopter sort in one of those locales, you can finally bust out Cortana like the Windows Phone kids in the States have been doing for some time. Cortana initially shipped with Windows Phone 8.1, an update to the Windows Phone platform that is now understood as a bridge between versions 8 and 10 of the Windows ecosystem.
Microsoft previously rolled Cortana out to the UK and Chinese markets, with the latter seeing a host of localized additions. It will be interesting to see if the addition of Cortana to new markets on the continent assists the mobile platform in its quest for new market share.
Microsoft has big plans for Cortana. The tool is expected to roll out in Windows 10, making the service not merely a mobile play, but something that embodies the company’s larger push to expand what it thinks of as “productivity.” It’s an ongoing process.
The company intends Cortana to be a differentiator for Windows, but it needs more data fed into its algorithms to learn enough to meet that goal. So, new countries, expect more of the same coming soon.
Microsoft declined to comment on what countries would come next in the broader Cortana rollout, merely indicating that “additional market availability will come in 2015.” Alert the media.