Getting Cortana to speak proper English like wot I do..

I've been playing around with Windows 10 for a few months now and despite people moaning about it (like people always do with any new release), I actually quite like it. There's no revolution in any of its lay out, its pretty much Windows 7 with a few shiny bits added.

One of the main additions to Windows 10 was Cortana. The ability to speak to your computer and get it to do stuff without you touching it. I've never really been into voice recognition software but since playing around with it on my Android whilst driving.. I've actually found it remarkably handy. I didn't expect it to work.. but it did.

Anyhoo, lets try it on Windows 10.. As far as I could tell it was all set up as UK English.. but apparently not! Cortana thought we were in America, and speaking American English. Good grief. Should be easy to change (after all this is Windows 10..). No. What a lot of faff for something that's main purpose is to make interacting with technology easier and more intuitive..

So first off, click on the Windows icon and go to Settings

Then select Time and Language etc

Then Additional date time and regional settings

Then click Region and then Administrative

Then click Copy Settings

What! Look! America! How did that get in there! Pesky imperialists.. 

Click the bottom two radio buttons asking if you'd like to copy your language to the Welcome Screen etc and then click OK

Phew, everything's back to Blighty!

Now go back to settings, easiest way might be to go back via the Windows button and head back to Time and Language etc and click on Region and Language

Click on Options

and click on Download under speech

Once the download has finished, click on Settings

These should all be set to UK, if they're not, select UK from the drop down lists and then click Apply settings to the Welcome Screen etc

Now, head back to Settings, Time and Language and then Speech and select English UK from the drop down.

For some reason with me, this option didn't appear straight away. I clicked around back and forth a couple of times and then it appeared as an option. Ideally, I guess a reboot would have prompted the appearance.

Its a lot of clicking around back and forth but it's the way its done! I've used it a couple of times and it is remarkably clever.