New Languages in Copilot

Amid a flurry of news about Copilot, from Microsoft introducing Copilot for Finance to public preview (perfectly timed to require me to update my last post on the Copilot State of the Union), to the announcement around Copilot Notebook reaching GA. to a whole slew of updates contained within a regular newsletter post called "What's New in Copilot for Microsoft 365".

It can be easy to be overwhelmed - and we'll walk through Copilot Notebook and Copilot for Finance in a future post.

Let's take time today to focus on one of those announcements that may at first glance appear to be merely an "ordinary" expansion - the ability to use Copilot in multiple languages.

As folks who have used generative AI for awhile know - the large language models are specific to particular languages and varieties. Both the input and the output require training on a set of words - and as you can see from the screenshot above - generative AI is not "magic" - if you ask Microsoft Designer (which uses DALL-E) to draw a picture containing words, you'll often see misspellings even in a supported language, let alone one it doesn't understand. Obviously, generating images using DALL-E is different than interpreting natural language requests in Copilot for Microsoft 365 - but it is a great example of how adding "language support" isn't something that one can simply snap your fingers and do easily.

That's why it is such a big announcement that Microsoft is adding a slew of languages to Copilot for Microsoft 365. Finally, folks across the globe can begin to use Copilot in their native languages and that exposes the possibility of Copilot to a much larger audience.

Over the next two months, Microsoft will expand from the current six languages and fourteen varieties listed here: English (US, GB, AU, CA, IN), Spanish (ES, MX), Japanese, French (FR, CA), German, Portuguese (BR), Italian, and Chinese Simplified.

The new languages and varieties are Arabic, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian.

Whether you are in Portugal or Thailand, these changes are a welcome addition and help ensure that the vast majority of the globe will now be able to consume Copilot for Microsoft 365 in their native language.

Microsoft also announced expanding the number of languages in Excel - which is still, as a reminder, in preview right now, alone of all the Microsoft 365 Applications. (PowerPoint, Word, OneNote, etc are all in Copilot but at general availability.) Soon Excel will be able to interpret not just English (US, GB, AU, CA, IN), but Spanish (ES, MX), Japanese, French (FR, CA), German, Portuguese (BR), Italian, and Chinese Simplified later this month.

I have chatted with a large number of clients who were convinced of the value of Copilot for Microsoft 365, but were simply waiting until native language support arrived to be able to start testing it internally and making the decision for how many licenses to purchase for their total organization.

And that means it is time to stop reading and start prompting!