Microsoft’s new Lumia Denim firmware expands Cortana rollout to extra countries

The next Windows Phone update, Denim, will bring Cortana to Australia, Canada, China, India, and the UK.

So Microsoft has finally announced the Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1, which is also called the Lumia Denim, at the IFA event in Berlin. And one thing has been confirmed, that the new update is going to make its way to a couple of Lumia devices. The new Denim update comes as a successor to the Cyan and has been rolled out exclusively for the Lumia devices which are expected to roll out byt the end of this year.

The new update has brought with it a lot of new and exciting features which will become part of the Lumia devices but the one that we had all been waiting for since a very long time is the personal assistant Cortana which so far has only been enjoyed in the form of a beta by US residents. Now thanks to the Denim update, this Cortana feature will be available in the UK and China too as a beta and an alphas program will be launched for Australia, Canada, and India. There is no need for the rest of the Europe to be disheartened because they are certainly on the roadmap of Microsoft but we couldn’t comment on that since nothing has been confirmed by the company as far as the dates go.

In this raging war of competitors, we are getting new things every day and the excitement just keeps building up. This time Microsoft has brought forth the “Hey Cortana” voice activation system which is going to operate in a similar manner to Siri and Google Now. This feature has been made possible with Nokia‘s SensorCore which is its hub for controlling a smartphone’s numerous sensors. The name has suggested pretty much everything and we can already tell that the users will be expected to say “Hey Cortana” to activate the personal assistant while the phone is idle.

The US launch of the Cortana on the other hand is going to be taken a step forward with its introduction towards vehicles with some feature integration via Bluetooth for contacts, snooze reminders, and calendar improvements. And Microsoft has also claimed that it will be bringing some improved natural language features too. If we all remember, Nokia has always been very keen on the imaging focus on smartphones and gladly this approach is being carried forward by Microsoft which has made some improvements to the camera part of the Denim. However, this also indicates towards rebranding of related apps away from the Nokia name. Denim is ditching the former Nokia Camera-branded for a new Lumia Camera app instead.

source: zdnet