Dan English's BI Blog

In working with Power BI Copilot one of the feedback requests I hear from my customers is being able to support non-English languages. While prompts submitted in languages other than English may occasionally return relevant responses, multilingual use is not officially supported at this time.

In June though the team released new tooling in Power BI Desktop that allows the author to include AI Instructions for the semantic model that will then be leveraged by Copilot. So what if we can perhaps use that to inform Copilot that we would like to have responses returned in a different language? Can this work? Well by the title of the post I believe you can figure out the answer;) Let’s see how this works.

In Power BI Desktop go into the ‘Prep data for AI’ tooling in the Home ribbon, click on ‘Add AI instructions’ and simply type in something along the lines of ‘For report summaries only use the Spanish language for responses.’

Now we can close this and open up the Copilot chat pane in Desktop, if you already have it open you would need to close and reopen it to sync up with the new changes made in the tooling. In the chat pane type ‘provide a summary of the report page’ and review the results (see image below).

We can see that Copilot did honor the AI instructions, and the response is in Spanish. This will work for any language, so if I set the instruction to be Italian instead would get the follow result.

Now if the report is published to the service you can test out Copilot there as well in the chat pane when viewing the report. Below is the test and left the updated AI instruction to show report summaries in Italian language.

Now the interesting thing is that this also supports the Power BI report subscriptions where you can include Copilot report summaries in the emails.

If you create a report subscription and test the “Summary by Copilot (preview)” feature you will see the following –

And if you run the subscription you will receive an email with the report summary in the supported language you specified in the AI instructions in desktop and in this example it is still in Italian.

Pretty cool, right? Just think what else we can do with the new AI instructions and using that with Copilot, the possibilities seem a bit endless;)

The new standalone Power BI Copilot experience has been released and now available to use. In order to start using this new experience the new tenant switch will need to be enabled as outlined here.

Once that is enabled and you refresh the browser you should see the new Copilot button in the left-hand navigation below the Home button as shown below.

If you click on this and are not assigned to a Fabric Copilot capacity you will be prompted to select a workspace that supports Copilot, similar to what you would need to do in Power BI Desktop.

Once that has been completed then you will get the new immersive Copilot experience within Power BI / Microsoft Fabric. Now you will have the full ability to search for Power BI reports, semantic models, as well as Data Agents that you have permissions to. The new search functionality and how that works is outlined here in the Find New Content documentation. This documentation provides information on how the results are prioritized and ways you can boost content to show up based on having items in favorites, recently used content, endorsing, and based on overall user telemetry.

Now instead of opening up a particular report you can start searching and asking questions such as “what is the wide world importers total sales for year 2014” and you will get a list of possible results to explore for the answer and in the example below I specify use result #1. With this particular result this semantic model hasn’t been marked as “Prepped for AI” which is a new “AI preparation” setting on the semantic model as documented here.

In this case even though the model has not gone through the process of “prep your data for AI” yet with the new tooling that is now available in Power BI Desktop I decide to roll the dice and click on the “View answer” button and get the following result.

Now if I wanted to I could use the exploration option here to further review and investigate the semantic model for the result that was provided or could review the actual report as well. In this case the answer isn’t provided in a report visual, it was queried from the semantic model directly. So in the explore option we can see the filters that were applied and see if that is what we were expecting.

This particular report didn’t have the information in any of the pages or visuals, it was just a quick create report that I let the service do during one of the demos I did at the Knoxville M365 Community Days event last year.

In another report I demo for report optimization this information is available as shown here though, just another way to verify the result, but the explore option is definitely another great way to do this as well😉

This new standalone experience is a great way to find content and quickly get results. Looking forward to hearing what others think about this and get your feedback. Please leave comments here or reach out to me directly through email or LinkedIn.

You can check out some new training documentation here to help get you started as well with a new tutorial, a new learn module, and a few blog posts to checkout as well:

• Tutorial for Copilot in Power BI
• Get started with Copilot in Power BI
• The next era of Copilot in Power BI: Chat with your Data (Preview)
• Extracting deeper insights with Fabric Data Agents in Copilot in Power BI