M365 Changelog: Viva Topics expands language support to French, German and Spanish

MC411434 – Viva Topics is expanding language support to French, German and Spanish in Q3CY2022, this will enable customers operating in content more than English benefit from Viva Topics and empower users to share more knowledge across org! Main capabilities include:

1. AI to process content written in not only English but also in French, German, and Spanish and extract topics from those content,
2. Human to curate topics in French, German and Spanish to enrich topics content and improve topics quality
3. Users to be able to view topics in align with users’ preferred language and switch language to view all content from topic page.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 72186

When this will happen:

Microsoft will begin rolling out mid-August and expect to complete by late September.

How this will affect your organization:

This feature will have AI to process your content written in French, German, and Spanish and extract topics from them. There is no need for Tenant/SharePoint admin nor knowledge admin to configure any settings for this feature. 

Viva Topics honor users’ preferred language setting to present Topics content. For example, If a user mainly uses French in daily work (Read and Write), and expect to view Topics in French, then the user needs to configure preferred language from Client apps or O365 users profile in order for Multilingual Topics to present content in French that users understand. Please be advised English is added as fallback language for backward compatibility, and Tenant default language is also added as fallback to accommodate the cases that Tenant default language is mostly used across the organization!

What you need to do to prepare:

1. Same as English content, should you have any SharePoint sites that you don’t want AI to process and mine Topics from, please exclude them from Viva Topics settings. 
2. Heads-up to your users about this feature and remind them to configure preferred language if they would like to consume topics in those languages. 

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