When Cloud Voicemail a.k.a. Azure Voicemail (which replaced Unified Messaging) is activated for a mailbox, a default language is set. This value is known as the ‘promptlanguage’ and according to Microsoft Documentation will be set based on the default language for your organisation in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

The problem is, that value is ‘English’ and doesn’t define which regional set of English you want – en-US, en-UK, en-AU etc. The full list of language codes is available here.

With Engish set as the preferred language, Azure Voicemail decides that you must be wanting en-US as your promptlanguage – which you may not actually want. The default voicemail greeting is rather different when set to en-US vs en-UK vs en-AU.

If you’d like to see what a user has, use the PowerShell command:

Set-CsOnlineVoicemailUserSettings -identity [email protected]

and check the value ‘PromptLanguage’.

On a per user basis, this value can be changed either by the user themselves at https://mysettings.lync.com/voicemail or by an admin with the PowerShell command:

Set-CsOnlineVoicemailUserSettings -identity [email protected] -PromptLanguage en-AU

This still doesn’t solve the tenant wide problem, or set a default.

For existing users, we just need to get a list of users and change the promptlanguage setting, which can be done with this set of PowerShell commands (includes connecting to SfBO which can be used for the above command also):

$sfbsession = new-csonlinesession -username [email protected] -OverrideAdminDomain contoso.onmicrosoft.com

Import-PSSession $sfbsession

$users = Get-CsOnlineuser

foreach ($user in $users) {set-csonlinevoicemailusersettings -identity $user.userprincipalname -promptlanguage en-AU}

Note the use of the -OverrideAdminDomain switch, which I learnt from this blog post in case you are having issues connecting to Skype for Business Online.

This process also may take a long time depending how many users you have, as very roughly it takes about a second per user to change the value.

This will fix your existing users, but what about new ones? You could have the setting modified set as part of the user creation process, but that’s an extra step and you’d need to wait for Azure Voicemail to be ready – in my experience it’s not a service that’ll be available quickly after enabling. At this stage I haven’t found a way to do it though, so you’ll need to consider adding this configuration as part of user setup.

If you haven’t even thought about what language you’re using – have a look and try each one, as you might find one that you’re happier with than the US.