Name Pronunciation Recordings Helps People Get Names Right

Message center notification MC917748 (last update 13 November 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 420329) marks the latest update for the Microsoft 365 user profile card. This time round, users get the opportunity to add a recording of up to ten seconds to help colleagues understand how to pronounce their name correctly (Figure 1).

Microsoft says that the “new feature helps promote diversity by giving working colleagues relevant information about each other. Names are a crucial part of a person’s identity. The incorrect pronunciation of a person’s name can lead to anxiety and offense in some cases. Correctly pronouncing a person’s name helps to create an inclusive environment.” Having the proven ability to make a mess of many peoples’ names in my career, I should find this feature useful.

Once a name pronunciation is available, people can play the recording back by clicking the playback button beside the user’s name (Figure 2).

General availability is scheduled for mid-January 2025, so the update is currently rolling out. The roadmap item tags the feature for Teams, but MC917748 correctly notes that it’s also available in OWA and the new Outlook for Windows (but not yet in Outlook classic). Over time, I assume that name pronunciation recording will show up everywhere that the Microsoft 365 profile card is visible.

Where Name Pronunciation Recordings are Stored

MC917748 says “Pronunciation data is stored in each user’s mailbox until the user deletes the recording.” Keeping the data in user mailboxes means that pronunciation recordings are available across all clients across all workstations and avoid the kind of problems encountered with Outlook classic where settings are usually held in the system registry.

The non-IPM folders of a mailbox are not visible to normal email clients like Outlook. Applications often use folders in this section to store configuration and other data. The new Outlook for Windows and OWA store many mailbox settings in sub-folders of ApplicationDataRoot, and browsing through those folders with the MFCMAPI utility reveals a folder called ApplicationDataRoot8c22b648-ee54-4ece-a4ca-3015b6d24f8esource_sourcenamepronunciation.

The folder holds a single message item containing the pronunciation recording. Figure 3 shows how the item appears in MFCMAPI. In my case, the recording takes 440,728 bytes (approximately 430 KB), which seems about right for a six-second recording.

Enabling Name Pronunciation Recordings

According to MC917748, the feature is off by default, meaning that you don’t see the icons to record and play back name pronunciation recordings in the user profile card. However, the feature is enabled in every tenant that I checked, possibly because Microsoft decided to enable it when the feature was in preview or first deployed to targeted release tenants late last year.

Control over name pronunciation recordings is via the Graph namePronunciationSettings resource type with APIs available to Get and Update the setting controlling whether users see the record and playback buttons. For instance, to get the current setting with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK, run these commands:

$Uri = "https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/admin/people/namePronunciation"
Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Uri $Uri -Method Get

Name                           Value
----                           -----
isEnabledInOrganization        True
@odata.context                 https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/$metadata#admin/people/namepronunciation/$entity

To update the setting to disable name pronunciation recordings, construct a hash table containing the new value and update (patch) the resource:

$Settings = @{}
$Settings.Add("isEnabledInOrganization", $false)
Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Uri $Uri -Method Patch -Body $Settings

The setting is on or off for a complete tenant. You cannot enable name pronunciation recording and playback for some mailboxes and not for others. This is very similar to the way that the setting controlling the display of personal pronouns (introduced in March 2023) is managed:

Uri = "https://graph.microsoft.com/V1.0/admin/people/pronouns"
Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Uri $Uri -Method Get

Name                           Value
----                           -----
isEnabledInOrganization        True
@odata.context                 https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/$metadata#admin/people/pronouns/$entity

Unfortunately, the API requests to control the name pronunciation settings currently fail with a 404 not found error. I’m sure that this is a transient problem that Microsoft will sort out soon.

Up to Organizations to Decide

Some consider this kind of addition to the user profile to be so much woke fluff. Others consider getting pronouncing names correctly is an essential part of business discourse. Both are entitled to their opinion. It’s good to have the choice within a world where dealing with different cultures and names is a reality for most.

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