Enabling Cortana After windows 8.1 update

Cortana, the most amazing feature of Windows Phone 8.1 is right now in beta and restricted to US only. There is a clear logic on why Microsoft has done it but then it doesn’t stop one to try it for features that can work on phone e.g. Setting up a reminder and so on. That said, if you are outside US and want to enable Cortana on your phone, you can do it by enabling regional settings on your phone.

Follow the steps as below:

1. Change Language Settings:  Pull down the notification centre by swiping down and tap on the All Settings. Navigate to Language and install the US. This will download and post that, you will be prompted to restart, Postpone it for now.
2.Change the region : In the settings page, look for REGION. Change this to United States. Make sure to keep the “Match phone language” option under Regional Format.

3. Re-check settings for Region, Speech and Speech: Check these again and restart your phone. When you do that, there will be a quick migration of few things. Don’t give a lot of thought to it.
After restart, hit the search button and you should see Cortana right up. Try out few commands and it should work nicely. The speech or the accent for other countries is not a problem for Cortana as long as you speak English. It was picking Indian accent pretty well.
source: http://www.wpxbox.com/how-to-enable-cortana-on-windows-phone-8-1/