Published Mar 19, 2025
Viva Learning is transitioning to an intent-based search, enhancing search results by understanding user queries semantically. This update, rolling out in March 2025, will personalize search experiences and improve content relevance. It affects various Viva Learning surfaces and supports all Viva Learning languages. Curators should enrich content attributes for better results.
Viva Learning Search is transitioning to an “intent-based” search from the current “keyword-based” search. As a part of “intent-based” search, Viva Learning will understand the core intent of the user query and show learning results based on user’s intent. Users can interact with Viva Learning Search in their natural language and get relevant content much easier. Intent-based search personalizes the Search experience for the user.
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 479749
When this will happen:
General Availability (Worldwide): We will begin rolling out on mid-March 2025 and expect to complete by late March 2025.
How this will affect your organization:
Viva Learning in-app searches are powered by Azure AI search. Viva Learning semantically understands the content based on Title, Description, Skill Tags, Keywords attribute of the content. These attributes are ingested into Viva Learning either from out-of-box connectors like LMS and 3P connectors or pushed into Viva Learning using VLGraph APIs.
When a user types a query in Viva Learning search, our semantic engine understands the user intent and matches it with the content processed previously. The semantic understanding happens for every user-query separately, the process is optimized so that users do not see any delay in Search results.
As Copilot in Viva Learning uses Viva Learning Search internally, Viva Learning Copilot results and suggestions are also enhanced to show intent based results. Semantic Search also takes the “prioritized-provider” configuration into consideration while showing results for every query.
PermissionsSemantic search takes all existing permissions (permissions set in Viva Learning, SharePoint or in LMS if applicable) into consideration while showing results.
Impacted SurfacesThe following are surfaces are impacted by Semantic Search:
Semantic Search is supported in all languages supported by Viva Learning.
Responsible AI: Please find Azure AI Search transparency note here.
The Microsoft Search team handles Viva Learning results in Microsoft 365 search surfaces (such as SharePoint and Bing@Work). Therefore, in-app Semantic Search results may differ from those in non-Viva Learning surfaces.
What you need to do to prepare:
Since Semantic Search relies on content titles, descriptions, skill tags, and keywords, Viva Learning recommends that learning curators enrich their content with detailed information on these attributes. This will help our semantic engine better understand the content and provide more accurate suggestions for user queries.