How to Use Copilot Studio: Complete Beginner Tutorial for Building AI Agents

if you are a beginner wanting to learn how to use  co-pilot Studio you have come to the right place   welcome to my complete tutorial for beginners I'm  going to take my time this one it's a long video   it's broken up into sections so that you can get  to the place you need if you already know some of  

the basics and I'm going to take you step by step  through everything you need to know to build your   own co-pilot agent as we're calling them now  with co-pilot studio so what we're going to be   covering in this video is in the first section  how to get started Ed with creating a co-pilot  

by describing it or by using one of the built-in  templates how to add knowledge and there's lots   of different ways you can add knowledge into  your co-pilots from public websites uploading   documents we'll talk a little bit about other  data sources like SharePoint and dataverse in  

there too the importance of building out topics  and controlling the way the conversation flows   which is called conversational orchestration why  it's not just all AI all the time and there's good   reason for that how to use entities and variables  which are some really clever things that help the  

co-pilot understand what's going on in the  conversation actions your co-pilot agent can   take action on your behalf by going out and  using flows to retrieve things or by getting   other pieces of information for you we'll talk  about the options you've got for publishing your  

co-pilot and then some of the other things that  you can do with it there's a lot in here if you   get value out of this please please help me out  by liking commenting sharing this with people   helps it reach more people and YouTube will help  get it out to all of those other people who want  

to learn this as well I am actually raing co-pilot  Studio as at the end of sort of late part of 2024   as the most strategic and useful skill that you  can learn in Power Platform you'll see that as we   go through but essentially this is the tool set  now that you use to build out your own co-pilot  

agent to extend co-pilot for Microsoft 365 or  any of the other first party co-pilots with   all of the new things that have been announced  coming through in the Wave 2 of the Microsoft   365 co-pilot this is getting even closer to that  experience and more relevant and the road map of  

where co-pilot agents are going which is more  that I want to cover here is is a very bright   future of interesting things that we're going  to be able to do i' would really encourage you   to come on this Learning Journey with me and I  hope you get a lot out of it so let's get started  

with part one building a co-pilot everything  happens here you just want to go to your   browser and go to this website co-pilot studio.  microsoft.com and sign up for a free trial now   everything I'm showing you in this tutorial I'm  working on a free trial so you've got no problem  

you don't need to pay for anything until you're  ready to actually publish your copilot agent and   put it out into the world you will need a work  or school account to sign up for that free trial   now this is the main landing page but when you  first first come in and sign up through that  

trial process it usually lands you here and this  is co-pilot helping you build a co-pilot there's   a fair bit of this kind of experience going on  in here of co-pilots helping you build co-pilots   but that's good so it says hi I'm here to help  you build a co-pilot in a few sentences how will  

your co-pilot assist your users so the scenario  that I'm going to work through here is using a   website that is local to my part of the world  here that's called The Better Health Channel   this is a series of sort of Articles and pieces  of advice on on health and Health Services it's a  

really good website because it's very information  Rich so I'm going to be using this scenario of   creating a co-pilot that can help people get  advice on Healthy Living so let's start with   that so we give it a a definition here uh so  how will you co your copilot assist your users  

it will help them find information about healthy  living now you can put whatever you want in there   I will show you where all these pieces go this  setup is actually helping you put together step   by step essentially something that sort of starts  by connecting to a website you don't have to start  

this way you can actually sort of jump straight  to this button here that says skip to configure   but if you're a beginner this is a really nice  way to get started so do I have any instructions   for how your co-pilot should assist for example  your a specific spefic tone I'm going to keep this  

one fairly General but you can add a fair bit of  personality in here so be friendly provide clear responses do not use medical jargon you can put  things in here like use emojis maybe we should   have done that we can come back and change it  and I'll show you use emojis um you can you  

can say use very casual language make sure you  summarize everything in bullet points so you can   actually put things in there that Define exactly  how the co-pilot is going to respond that's called   instructions custom instructions where should the  co-pilot find important information now at this  

stage this is starting to add knowledge the only  knowledge that we can add in at this stage is the   public website but we will be able to go in and  edit this co-pilot to add more things if you want   to create a co-pilot that doesn't use a website  you can just skip this step you can just say  

no website so I'm going to put that whole website  link in there and it's going to think about that   one a little bit more are there any topics  or tasks co-pilot shouldn't help with or talk   about so let's say we don't want it to actually  recommend any specific Medical Services or health  

practitioners so we'll just put that in there so  what I've done now is given this some guidelines   I've given my co-pilot guidelines about how  I want to set up the co-pilot I've given it a   purpose I've given it some instructions about  how it should respond where it should get its  

Knowledge from and something that I don't want it  to do it confirms all of those things so that is   good we can just click create when we're done and  it will go ahead and set that up so this is going   to put all of those things inside the co-pilot  it's going to actually deploy a co-pilot for  

you just on the language I'm going to go back  and forth a little bit here between calling it   a co-pilot and a co-pilot agent I've always  only called it a co-pilot just recently the   language from Microsoft is starting to call  these co-pilot agents so if I flick back and  

forth essentially the same thing copilot agent  is just the more modern term and I haven't quite   caught up with that yet all right so we have  a co-pilot here ready to go let's have a look   at where all those things went when I described  the purpose of what I was doing that's helped it  

to choose a name which is fine it's brought all  of this in here into these instructions so this   is taking what I asked it to do in the first  place its purpose and be friendly and provide   clear responses and avoid using medical jug and  so all of those pieces I've put in there have  

been combined into this piece that's called the  instructions which is that sort of it's like an   overarching prompt that this co-pilot agent has  every time it produces a response it uses that   as a a guideline we can change that as we go so  that you see what's going on we've got knowledge  

in here so it is connected to this website I don't  know if you can hear the birds chirping outside I   where I live it's getting towards the end of  the day and the the they're rainbow lates in   case you want to look up what that bird noise is  outside and if you can't hear it then I can hear  

it and I'm mildly distracted by it we have got in  here the Better Health Website that we just put   in and the other thing here is that the general  knowledge is enabled that means it can use the   large language model to sort of figure out answers  for things that might not be just in there we'll  

have a look again later at what the difference is  between those things so we can actually give this   a a test run here so if I come in here and have a  look at something that's on this website you can   see we've got some information here about sleep  and and managing sleep and fatigue so let's give  

this a go we'll come in and say how can I manage  fatigue and this is as I said it's only created   it 2 minutes ago it usually takes a couple of  minutes to to tee this up but within only a   few minutes here I've managed to create my first  co-pilot agent and it's connected to a website and  

it's answering questions now why is there a great  big long video Beyond this you might you might   ask realistically this is a really good sort of  party trick of being able to go look at this I've   pointed to a website here it is it's all working  there is so much more to this and I can't stress  

enough how important it is to not just create a  co-pilot point it at a website and go okay great   job done it's a good exercise to go through for  learning but there are many other things you don't   want a co-pilot most of the time that is just  completely dependent on one website and just using  

generative answers generative AI to produce the  answers to that website I mean if that meets your   needs good luck to you and thanks for watching  but realistically there are always Specialties   in saying but if someone asked this kind of  question I need it to answer this way and I  

need it to refer to these other knowledge sources  and I want it to do other things so we're going to   go through all of that there is a skill in this in  the thought process of the actual design I'll try   and talk through as much of that as I can as we  go but these are sort of learned skills the more  

experience you get so in the response here fatigue  can be managed in these different ways and there's   a couple of references so you see it's coming back  here with the fatigue fighting tips so if I click   through that's going to open that Source in there  now I am just working here in a test canvas the  

other thing you can do is if I click on here we  can open this track between topics I'm going to   show you another experience as we go a little bit  further into it if I refresh this one now and if   I got that one still on uh so you could ask it  to say give me uh three tips as bullet points  

for managing let's spell it wrong because it can  handle that I know how to spell it can actually   so this is the the concept here is we've got  this large language model it can actually sort   of interpret and understand things so there you  go I've asked the prompt in a different way and  

it's actually come back so it's capable of doing  that what we've got in the middle here is the   canvas that's actually showing the flow of that  conversation and where it went so when we come   back in a little bit to the idea of topics this is  actually what's called a fullback topic so this is  

basically just a sort of a default position within  the co-pilot to say if of all of the other things   I've told you how to answer you can't find the  answer just fall back to this one at the moment   this cop it is literally just a single fallback  topic with that website so that's all it does but  

we can build other layers on top of that so let's  take a look at this concept of knowledge and what   this is doing in here we will come at the end  to actually sort of publishing this all the way   through here I'm going to work just in this test  canvas this is the experience for building but in  

the end the idea here is that we are building  a co-pilot that's going to be published out   somewhere either as an internal co-pilot for  your users or as an exter Journal co-pilot on   our website or various other channels or you  can use this as an extension to your Microsoft  

365 co-pilot or co-pilot for sales or co-pilot for  service or Finance or all of those things as well   so wherever it's going in the end it's going to go  out into the world this experience is uh is just   how we are testing it so let's come into this  knowledge section here and this is where we're  

navigating all of the experiences about adding  knowledge into the system so at the moment what   we've got here is a website and and it's ready  to go we can come in here and open the details   let's edit this one and have a look now you'll see  the knowledge description here is actually both  

mandatory and blank which is interesting when you  go through the process that we just went through   of the quick create it skips over that part but I  want to come in here and show you this CU this is   actually really really important here what is  going on here is that this is a description of  

what this knowledge does so at the moment it  just creates one topic that just goes off to   that website it doesn't matter but you imagine  you might add five or six different websites   in here or websites and documents and lots of  other things this description is like a it's  

almost like a prompt that helps the AI understand  what this is actually doing so it's called better   health so let's as the outset sort of Tidy this  up a bit there's the web page link but but let's   call this The Better Health Website because we can  have a name that's not the website and then the  

description here is something like you want to say  something about what it actually does so this is   providing information about uh healthy living and  information about um health conditions and support   services something like that you will see later  why this becomes important let's just save that  

because we're going to start using AI to help the  co-pilot it determine which pieces of information   it should use when and so that description  and it's worth I'm doing a bit of a quick job   there but it is actually really worth thinking  that through and taking your time and refining  

that can really improve the performance of what  you're doing before we go any further with adding   additional knowledge sources and talking them  through I want to show you an example of a website   where something doesn't work quite so well because  this one you might realize I've chosen because  

it works beautifully it is a very knowledge  Rich website all of the information here is   on the page there's a lot of information on that  page and the co-pilot is actually able to read all   of that and provide really good answers so this  is a really good example of a website that works  

well one of the tricks or traps that people will  fall into is if you have a website that has a lot   of JavaScript or elements that are displayed  as tables on the website the co-pilot can't   actually read those so this is an example here of  uh Melbourne pollen where I live in the world we  

have a very High pollen count there's a whole a  whole website uh dedicated to you know people who   have asthma and conditions that need to be aware  of this thankfully at the time of recording this   it's all uh in the nice low category but something  like this right this is a beautiful table where we  

are able to look at what's going on in here  but if I grab this website for instance and   let's come back into my um my bot here I can add  another website so this is just sort of showing   you what you can do with adding more things in  here again let's give this a description so we'll  

say provides the pollen forecast for areas of  Melbourne and Victoria and add that one in there   we'll give it a second to spin up while I explain  what's going on here so as a human I can look at   this beautiful table here and determine exactly  what's going on this is designed for very good  

human readability I can come in here and straight  away say yep East gips land is low and see exactly   what what's going on if I have a look though at  the page source so let's click right click here   and say view page source and if I do something  like let's find the text for East Gibs land which  

is a region in the state sort of near where I live  but if we go through here this is actually the   table so you'll see here we've got the forecast  cell with the grid but if you look at this what   I'm looking at as a human on the screen is a  beautifully laid out table that has one piece of  

and another piece of information about the  forecast this has now got East GPS land and   the fact that the forecast level is low is  sitting I don't know it's kind of hard to   see it's in there because this is all formatted  in a way that's designed to work for displaying  

it and not actually in a it's not actually in a  structured format or a structured table that an   generative AI is going to be able to uh read so  let's close that one down and I'll show you what   happens here so if we come back into to our bot  and Bot that co-pilots used to be called chat Bots  

or Bots I'm just a little all over the place with  keeping up with the language bot equals chatbot   equals actually no an agent is more sophisticated  than a bot forgive me I'm going to try not to call   it a bot anymore what is the pollen forecast  for East Gibs land and you'll see it's gone  

into that knowledge Source where we looked at  before and it says to find the pollen forecast   you can check local weather okay so that hasn't  helped me particularly what this is doing where it   says AI generated content may be incorrect what's  happening if I go back to my overview here is that  

it's using this so spoiler alert I've already told  you it can't find the answer in that knowledge   Source but I'm not really proving it very well  here because I've got this enabled so this part   is where you get this message AI generated content  may be inre correct means it's using the same way  

that if you go to Just copilot microsoft.com on  the public website or chat GPT that large language   model is able to answer things for you that's what  this is doing so you will have use cases where   that is highly useful and desirable and you'll  have used cases where you say no I want to lock  

down my co-pilot so that the only thing that it  can answer is the knowledge sources that I give it   so if you set that feature to disabled instead of  enabled now it can't use its own general knowledge   to be able to answer the questions now I've  said you only know what I've given you access  

to so let's see what happens here if we test the  difference um I've actually got a whole other   video on that feature in particular if you want  to go deeper into it and showing you some of the   things that it can do so we'll give that a refresh  and we'll ask the same question I am also going to  

give it a question or something it it definitely  can answer so as much as it can't handle this sort   of table format if I go into the sort of About Us  section this is a nice text based thing so let's   come back in here and say um tell me about the  Melbourne pollen service so this is something it  

can do because it can read this off the website so  it's gone into find that data source there we go   gives you the information gives you the link let's  try the forecast again what is the pollen forecast   or east GS land I'm always worried doing doing  live demos there we go can't find it we're going  

to have a solution for this later when we get to  the section on actions I'm going to show you how   you can make this kind of data accessible in  a properly structured table but for now just   be aware that if you're using your website as  a knowledge Source if you've got a lot of Ja  

if you've got a lot of JavaScript or a lot of  beautifully formatted elements and things on   the screen the generative AI may not be able to  answer that it's all done based on the indexing   that happens underneath and that's the same  indexing that Google and Bing used for the  

search indexes so if you can't find it on Google  or you can't find it on Bing or you can't find it   using copilot microsoft.com this isn't going to  find it either because it's not accessible to the   index so something to keep in mind if you've got  control of a website that you're trying to connect  

to that that will be a a limit so let's go back  now and have a look at some of the other knowledge   options so the next thing I'm going to show you is  that you can upload a document into here so I have   got a document in here somewhere let's take a look  at my sample document here I have got a PDF that  

I've downloaded in keeping with our Healthy Living  this is the Australian dietry guidelines so we've   got standard serves of things in here so this  goes through and tells you what a standard serve   or vegetables fruit grain all of those things  looks like so we will just close that one down  

so let's come into here and now I'm going to add  knowledge and I'm going to drag and drop a file   here so I'm going to go to my other monitor and  just grab that PDF in there and again let's be   good about giving it a description so this one I  think I've got this one here already information  

about I'll just paste it in and describe it to you  so I've put the description in there information   about the Australian dietry guidelines including  standard serves of all the major food groups and   recommended daily intake so I've given that  quite a bit of information now what this is  

doing is actually uploading the document into  dataverse underneath Don't Panic this is it's   not actually creating a datab base or anything  in there but it's using that dataverse indexing   to process that document so while it's sitting  here in progress It's processing that document  

and using that indexing to be able to understand  it obviously the larger the document you've got   in there the longer that's going to take there's  a range of different file formats you can use in   there you can put in EBS PDFs are obviously the  obvious One Word documents so there's there's a  

bunch of things you can you can put in there you  were able to put Excel files in there I wouldn't   recommend that it it it gives you a bit of a uh  it gives you a bit of a sense of feeling like   you're putting a structured data table in there  but Excel isn't actually properly structured so  

this works best with chunks of text unstructured  chunks of text so any document in that kind of   format this is one where I have done a little bit  of editing because even though that ready pops up   within about 30 seconds it does take a little bit  longer than that to actually work give it a few  

minutes this is a good way to go away and have  a beverage of choice or or do something else now   if I come in here and say how much is a standard  serve of bread we will see that it's actually able   to draw that response there from the Australian  dietry guidelines serving slice is approximately  

4 40 G so if I click on that you'll see it comes  up here now this is different from the experience   of connecting it to the website because when we  connected it to the website it actually redirected   to that website whereas when you upload a document  it's taken that document actually into the the  

co-pilot knowledge and it will actually show the  section so we've got here the one slice of bread   you notice you sort of lose all the formatting  here because the original document looked much   nicer than that so again you got to think about  the use case for this but it's very good if you've  

got knowledge that you want to be able to sort of  upload and have the co-pilot refer to that maybe   doesn't or can't for some reason exist on a public  website and where it's an unauthenticated use case   putting it on SharePoint means that people would  have to authenticate in let's take a look at those  

other knowledge sources now so if we come in here  and say let's add knowledge there's SharePoint I'm   not going to do these two here because my use  case here is very much external but if you'd   like to see videos on the SharePoint and data ver  knowledge please let me know in the comments and  

I'll I'll work on those but SharePoint basically  means you can point at a SharePoint document   Library so you put the URL in there there is  a little bit more fiddling around there with   setting up the authentication for the users to be  able to access that and same with datae that one  

will actually allow you to connect to data verse  tables and again it gives you the option to put   in descriptions of things and you can use that as  a knowledge Source but again there's a a fair bit   more in there that is uh a little bit more that I  want to get into in this tutorial so let me know  

if you would like to see those things there are  actually other knowledge sources in here as well   you can bring in Enterprise data connections I  don't have any in this environment at the moment   but you can connect to third-party data sources  if those connections have been set up so plenty  

more coming there this whole knowledge feature  at the time that I'm recording this video is all   still quite new so watch this space but the idea  of kind of giving your co-pilot knowledge is such   a core concept of the value of a co-pilot in a  business scenario rather than just this General  

thing of being able to have a co-pilot that's out  there just randomly answering questions from the   website with the large language model which is  most of what we're used to or having something   that's connected the Microsoft 365 copilot for  instance is connected to all of your documents  

and your chats and your emails and not everyone  wants that all the time for every scenario so   the idea here is that you're giving it a very  contained controlled set of knowledge and you   can see that it's only answering questions  based on that knowledge that we're giving it  

all right that's part two done let's have a look  now at part three which is how we used topics now   topics are really important to control the flow  of the information you don't necessarily want   the generative AI taking full responsibility for  answering all these things so this is the concept  

of conver ational orchestration where you can  decide how you want to direct the conversation   including which knowledge sources you want to use  for which parts of the conversation or actual sort   of hardcoded answers and variables and things that  you want it to be able to do so all of this lives  

in this menu here called topics so we're going to  do a couple of important things first lesson one   lesson two and lesson three are topics that are  useful if you want to play around with a sort of   a demo these are things that ask you about the  store opening hours for places in uh in Redmond in  

Seattle what I want you to do is just switch those  three to the off position because if you're doing   anything at all that overlaps with those you're  going to get some weird answers and you just   don't want them as part of your actual co-pilot  the other thing that we've got in here is to  

look at the difference here between custom topics  which is what these ones are and the system topics   which is things that are sort of just functional  helping the co-pilot to work so there are things   in here which are escalation topics I'm not going  to cover that here but you can escalate to a live  

agent in Dynamic 365 customer service we have got  sort of things that happen if there's an error   or there's multiple topics matched uh We've also  got something here that can help you with getting   feedback at the end of a conversation so the one  that I want to two that I want to show you here  

are these two at the start so you'll notice it  starts off with hello I'm healthy living assistant   virtual assistant just so you're aware I sometimes  use AI to answer your questions from here this is   sort of more talking to me as a Creator this  is not particularly useful for me as something  

that's facing out to maybe customers who want to  use this you'll notice as soon as I have clicked   on this it's actually gone into this topic for  me but let me go back and show you where that   is so in the system it's this one here that's  called the conversation start topic and you  

can actually change this so it says hello I'm bot  name so that's the first idea of a variable we're   going to be looking a little bit more at variables  but that's the Healthy Living assistant so if you   change the bot name that will change you don't  have to have that in there I am going to remove  

some of this if you provided a website during  creation so we're just that's sort of like an   instruction to the maker we're going to remove  that um what can I help you with today so you   can put in whatever you want here I'm just going  to use my little emoji keyboard to get an Apple  

in here in case you don't know Windows period  Windows full stop is a way to get the emoji   keyboard so let's pop a little apple in there  just to add a little bit of color and then what   you can do is save that now this is a trap the  save button looks like it's grayed out oh no what  

am I going to do click out of that now we're good  always get caught by that so we're going to save   that and now when I refresh my co-pilot I get  that new message M so that is in topics system   topics conversation start topic or click on it and  it will take you straight there so let's create an  

example of a custom topic so let's say I want a  topic here which is controlling the conversation   if somebody says what do I do in an emergency  so if I come into my actual bot if you lose the   test canvas at any point you can just put that  there what do I do in an emergency then it will  

give us an answer and it may be good or bad but  we might want a real nocking around situation   here that just says call the emergency number so  we've got like quite a lot of stuff in here maybe   I want to control this conversation so that every  single time all it does is tell you this piece of  

information here in Australia tri0 is 911 that's  our emergency number so what I'm going to do is go   into the topic section here and I'm going to say  add a topic now I can either create a topic from   blank or I can use co-pilot to help me build  a co-pilot topic so we'll give this topic a  

name this is going to be emergency and create  a topic to tell the user to call to dial triple 0 for whoops for an ambulance or police now if  you do something more sophisticated here if you   say you can put in sort of branching logic to  say if the person asks for this do that so you  

can actually play around with that description  and it will do some fancy things we'll show you   that couple of things that are really important  here firstly the trigger has come through with   these phrases now this is the old school way  of doing it we're going to upgrade this in a  

minute this is using phrases so the idea here is  that the co-pilot agent is going to be able to   figure out which topic where it should go in the  conversation based on these trigger phrases and   therefore whatever the person types it's able to  detect the intent using these trigger phrases and  

so you'll see it's automatically generated  a few for me I could edit those phrases if   something isn't quite right and you can see here  that it's basically interpreted what I put in   the instruction and put that in there so maybe  that's good enough we've got some other things  

that we can edit in here but I'm actually very  happy with that one so I'm just going to save   that and we'll see the difference here if we  refresh this and say what should I do in an emergency and you'll see in the canvas that it's  actually triggered the right topic and it's given  

the right answer so it's now not using those  knowledge sources I've got complete control over   those topics anything here when you're designing  your co-pilot and designing the way you want it   to work anything that could be get you in legal  trouble of any kind anything that needs some sort  

of like regulatory overlay anything that's related  to safety anything that's really important to your   brand think of any major brand and think about  how you want certain questions to be answered   if you're um apple and somebody says what's the  best phone you might want that answered a certain  

way and not just by generative generative answers  so anything where you really and and think about   this cuz almost any co-pilot that you're using in  a real scenario you are going to want to control   that conversation at some point this is a really  simple example we can do much more sophisticated  

things of the topics which I'm going to show you  but the first thing I'm going to do is upgrade   this experience to something that's currently  in preview but is actually going back to why   we put all those descriptions in and something  that's actually going to perform much better than  

this sort of it's strange to think of this as old  school now because 3 years ago this was this was   state-of-the-art stuff but we're going to go here  into set things and generative AI how should your   co-pilot interact with people this oh sorry we're  calling it classic not old school I shouldn't call  

it old school classic I'm going to choose this  generative preview and click save and you'll see   here that you can also choose how this is this  is a temperature control this is a generative AI   concept of should the content moderation be very  creative or very precise I'm actually just going  

to set it at the the medium level there because  I think that gives it a little bit more freedom   to move so this now changes the experience so  that the description of everything is what is   going to be used so this is actually using now  the the large language model to determine the  

flow of the conversation rather than that classic  experience that we've had in the past which isn't   as sophisticated at doing this so let's close  this down and now if I go into my topic you'll   see I've lost that topic let's go back into  topics and have a look at my custom topic  

called emergency this is now do you see it's got  a description and I didn't do this I didn't edit   the video here at all it's taken those trigger  phrases and converted it into a description but   from now on because I've got that setting enabled  it's always going to use the description of what's  

going on in the knowledge sources in here  to determine which thing it should trigger   so this is why you want to be careful about doing  those descriptions to help out and if you find as   you test out your agent that it's not finding the  right topics having a look at the descriptions of  

how you've set up those topics and knowledge  sources is going to be your first point of   troubleshooting now let's have a look at the next  level of sophistication in creating topics which   is part four here entities and variables so I am  going to create another topic here based on this  

piece here where we are offering guidance of where  to seek support for mental health services for   children and young people and if we have a look  at this content here there's quite a lot on here   but you'll see that there are different Services  here for children sort of up to 12 years old and  

then for pre-teens and uh and youth so there's a  uh service here called headspace which is designed   for ages 12 to 15 and this other one here triple  P which is really designed for up to 12 year olds   so I'm going to use this to show you a build  of a conversation that can understand entities  

and we'll come to this entities by the way here  does not mean data database entities if you're   familiar with that old language in dataverse this  is actually the concept of a a piece of known or   structured data that sits in unstructured text so  if I in that piece where I was just looking at it  

says this is for 12y olds the age can be an entity  so that could find the AI can actually look for a   specific type of piece of information in there  it's looking for the age you can also do this   for things like looking for colors or names of  cities or names of organizations I'm going to use  

the standard one here but you can also create  these entities for your own language to help   the co-pilot identify those specific pieces of  information in large blocks of unstructured text   this is this is quite clever and highly underrated  this one is uh this is a good thing to know about  

so what am I going to do I'm going to create a  another new topic here and we will create this one   from a description again so this one is going to  be support services for mental health is the name   of the topic and I'm going to give this one a bit  more of a description to helpfully show you what  

is going on here so create a topic to guide the  user to different mental health support services   based on the age of the person who needs support  there will be options for children young adults   and adults let's see how we go with that so you  can see there I'm implying that there's going to  

be some kind of branching logic let's see if  it can actually do this so what this should   do for me here we go so it's actually given me a  trigger so this tool can handle queries like this   so you'll see it's written that description based  on what I asked it to do and then it said what is  

the age group and it's given me multiple choice  options so it says children young adults or adults   and then which one is it so if we use this topic  it will actually give you those options where it   says is this for actually let's uh let's let's do  this so I'll show you what this looks like so what  

happens is now if I say uh mental health support  it should automatically trigger that topic because   we've got that in there and then it's going to  give me these options cuz it's multiple choice   children young adults or adults now I didn't  finish building this out if I click children  

nothing will happen because um oh here we go it's  actually kind of filled this in with its own sort   of suggestions and um interesting so it's the AI  has actually built out the whole topic for me but   I want more control than this I actually don't  want it to use these multiple choice but you can  

use multiple choice in there so I am going to edit  this topic and in fact what I'm going to do is   go into my topics I'm actually going to  delete this one so let's go in and find it support services for mental health um  we're going to go in here I'm just going  

to grab this description because the description  the description is good and I don't want to type   it again but I want to show you what we can do for  creating a topic from scratch so let's copy that   so we're going to go back into topics and support  services for mental health delete delete okay I'm  

just going to call it something slightly different  so that I don't uh confuse things here so we're   going to create a topic from blank this time and  the title of this topic is going to be mental   health support services just so it's not exactly  the same and then I'm going to use that lovely  

description that we had before as the things the  same concept what I want to do here though is   to ask a question and not give it multiple choice  I want it to pick up on the age because I want to   show you these entities so as you're building out  the topic these are all of the different things  

that we can do in here you can send a message  which is just giving a response ask a question   which is what I'm about to do but we've also got  a bunch of other sort of more advanced things here   we're going to come back to the uh call and action  you can redirect to another topic or finish with  

a survey there's all sorts of things you can do  in there so this is the uh the one I'm going to   show you ask a question how old is the person  who needs support now instead of this multiple   choice experience that we had before what I'm  going to say is I want you to identify in here  

a particular type of information so this is where  we've got different things so not multiple choice   or options from a list age so age is one of the  entities that we've got in there so now it's able   to find that in the conversation what I want to  do now is save that user response as a variable  

and that variable means I can use that in other  ways I could use that to push it out in an action   to send to some other system I can use it to  repeat back into the conversation which I'll   show you so what we can do here is if I click on  this one this brings up the variable now you don't  

want to go naming things V one because as soon as  you got more than one it's going to get confusing   let's leave VAR as the prefix and call this one H  and you'll see that you can set this variable to   be working just within this topic or I might make  this one Global which means anywhere in this agent  

if the conversation leads down this path and the  age is determined it can be used elsewhere as well   which could be a useful thing in this scenario  now what I'm going to do is add this conditional   branching that we saw before but I'm not doing it  based on the I'm not doing it based on on multiple  

choice I'm actually doing it based on the that  number that it's found so we're going to add a   condition and the condition is going to be based  on the age and I want that to be if it is less   than or equal to 12 we can rename this condition  so this can be child even though we don't have  

the options that we had before so that's what's  going on there let's add another condition in   here go here again add a condition cuz I want I  want child teenager or young adult and then just   everybody else is the sort of if neither of these  things is true so if the age is greater than or  

equal to 13 and the age is less than or equal to  25 cuz remember that service for young adults I'm   just going to call this one teen and young adult  and then this one here is going to be we'll just   leave that as all other conditions that's what's  going to happen let's just save this before we  

lose it so what we've got so far now is it's going  to trigger the topic how old is the person and   then it's going to find the answer so now what we  want to do is continue this conversational thread   so if it's a child this is the part I didn't do  before we want to send a message so for someone  

who is now we can bring the variable back in here  variable age so we can repeat it back years old   we recommend the triple P service now you can put  more things in here I'll show you one example of   something being a little bit more fancy so let's  just take a look at the headspace website I'm  

going to link to their services page I'm actually  going to get one of the images from here if I   right click on this and you find something where  you can say copy image link then what we can do is   add a message in here so let's click here send  a message but instead of just having that very  

basic message like we had before you have actually  got the option here if you go in you can actually   use different kinds of cards so you'll see here  that you've got the ability to add images in   there videos adaptive cards which is a whole other  skill set if you've got that that you can do even  

more sophisticated things in here I'm going to use  the basic card again if you're interested in more   detail on all of this topic stuff then let me know  we can do more videos on this I'm trying to give   you the the highlights all in this one video here  so uh for teens and young adults we recommend head  

space and then what we can do here in the media  section come in and put headspace is the title and   you'll see it's building it out as I work through  it so we'll go mental health support for young people and then the image URL which is the one I  just grabbed we'll just paste that in and then we  

can put the text in there as well that should  work and you can also add buttons in there too   now we can for all other conditions add a message  here that is saying refer to some other service   or we could use this topic to say let's refer  to a particular website so let's go back to  

the better health channel here and I'm going to  find Mental Health Services now this will only   work if the URL is only two levels deep I should  have said that at the start your url that you put   in here will only work if it's two levels deep  but once you've got that in there it will find  

everything below that that so I'm actually  just going to use this particular subsection   of the site so we're going to go back into the  topics and I'm going to use Advanced here and say   generate anwers and then we are going to take the  input which is we need to find the system input  

so this is the activity. text so this one here  activity. text is basically whatever the person   has typed in here this might not work so well  because I've got this question but we'll go   with it and then we can put the data sources in  here and say I want to add knowledge I want to  

add a public website and I want to put that one  in there let's pretend I've done the description   I think I've I think I've explained that well  enough and now what we've got is something   that is going to use generative answers within  that topic to go to a specific page so see how  

you can use that knowledge to actually  sort of embed it in a particular place   that could have been a document there as well  so lots of different things here in controlling   how this works let's give this a test run now  uh I'm not sure how well my generative answers  

will work with this question in here I'm not  going to worry too much about that cuz mostly   what I'm trying to show you here is the entities  concept so you'll notice now remember when I had   my track the conversation before this has now got  me a different option because I switched over to  

that new generative AI experience earlier I've now  got this wonderful thing called a conversation map   and this is now going to show me the sort of inner  workings of how the agent is deciding which topics   and which knowledge sources to use let's give  this a refresh I want to show you the variable  

and the entity filling first so the first thing  we're going to do here is to say uh mental health support and it should trigger that topic and  in fact it should show me on the side here   what's going on with that so it can see that  it has triggered the topic and it's asked the  

question how old is the person who needs support  so let's try out our beautiful card let's put in   someone who is 18 and there we go we get the heads  space with the link and that card that we showed   the other thing about the entities is that it can  identify it even if the person doesn't just give  

a straight answer so in the previous one we just  put in the number 18 which looks fairly easy but   let's say the person comes in and asks for mental  health support and then it will ask how old is the   person who needs support my child is 6 years old  so I haven't just given it the number but it's  

actually able to find that piece in there and  then go ahead and and do that so it can extract   and this is useful for things like emails or order  numbers or any of those things that you want to do   it can extract that information and it can also  just know in the conversation if it's already  

got that information and you can allow it to skip  this question so if we have a look at the options   for this question you can actually say that the  question can be skipped if the person has started   the conversation with I need mental health support  for my six-year-old then it already knows that and  

it can skip the question so you can do some quite  clever authoring with entities again if you want   more on that I can go deep on entities but that  should give you enough for a beginner tutorial   to get started with that as well as with variables  that you can use to put back into the conversation  

and when we get to the next section on actions  you can also use variables there as well so let's   take a look part five here at what we can do with  actions which is this next one here create your   first action this is about allowing the co-pilot  to do something to go out in the world and get  

some information so there's different ways that we  can create actions here you have got some popular   ones we're going to use the weather forecast  one cuz that's the one that's easy to use it's   an external one that doesn't require any kind of  sign up so if you're learning anyone can access  

this one but you can do this if you've got apis  into your existing systems that have been set up   or other apis you can use that we have also got  the ability to use power automate flows so I'm   going to show you that concept as well and if  you're a Power Platform person and you've been  

working with connectors and custom connectors  those are all available to you here so you will   find yourself on familiar ground so let me show  you the concept first of using this API action so   this is the MSN weather forecasting tool which  actually gives you a great deal of information  

about what's happening with the weather so back  to our sort of thread about the pollen counts and   things maybe we want to check the UV index as  well so this one is going to reach out and get   that information what we're going to do here is  switch this from user authentication to co-pilot  

author authentication so that the user doesn't  have to do some kind of login again that's there   so that if you want an authenticated source for  the user to log in that will do that but for this   one that's publicly available that just messes it  up frankly so we want to have that in there and  

then we've got different options to configure  so again we've got the action name the display   name remember the description and why that's  important but it's pretty much there with the   connector so that's okay so let's click next and  then what we've got is inputs and outputs so the  

inputs here we have got the locations so this is  looking for the city or the place where the person   is coming from and we've also got units which is  the measurement system are we talking Imperial   or metric units when we have got the outputs here  there's 39 different outputs so there's a lot of  

different things in here we can come in and edit  the outputs and let's say I don't want the moon   phase code I can delete that one and move all of  those things around and you'll see we've got a lot   of different things in here we've got the wind  direction the wind speed precipitation a whole  

lot of a whole lot of things in here so I'm just  going to leave them all in but you could actually   really narrow this down to just provide you with  the things that you want and we're going to click   save and next so that is all done get the forecast  and let's finish that now we can actually change  

this up a bit I'll show you how it works and then  we can uh then we can give it a second to to come   in we can actually come in here and change it so  that it knows that it's only working in certain   units but let's just uh we can just say what is  the forecast in Bendigo today that's another city  

in the state where I live we'll see if it can  handle that's fairly obscure reference for it   um all right and it's got saying we've missing  some information so it's actually saying here so   this is good this is a good error I definitely  did this on purpose so what this is doing is  

saying the idea of the plug-in here is that this  action needs certain inputs it needs the input of   the location so you can see in this canvas on the  side here that it's got the location as Bendigo   it's picked that up from the the the thing this is  a little bit like that entity thing that we were  

just looking at it's looking for a location and  it can identify that but it also needs the units   so it needs to know do we want Imperial or metric  and it can't answer that it's missing information   but it's able to figure out what it's missing and  ask for it I didn't build that right you didn't  

see me build the topic that said to ask for that  it's just that's just part of the part of how it   works I work in I work in metric here in Australia  so we're going to go with that given that it's my   Healthy Living based on information here now it's  happy it's got both of those things and we should  

get we should get the forecast come on you can do  it we can do it all right I still haven't finished   with this one but that's a good example of how  it comes together let's give this an edit because   I've obviously skipped over something important  here in the topic so so let's go into my action  

let's change a couple of things so the input  the location is going to be dynamically filled   with something that comes from the user's response  that's still true but the units instead of being   dynamically filled this time I want to say we're  going to set this as a certain value and then I'm  

going to choose the value either Imperial or  Celsius forgive me if you're watching from the   United States I'm going to go with Celsius so now  we've got that set so shouldn't actually ask me   for that anymore but on the outputs there's one  other thing here so we've got all these outputs  

but we haven't actually given it the space to  respond so we do want it to respond that would   be helpful thank you and so now what we've got is  the option to say the user will see either the AI   dynamically generates a message or I can create a  message so if I say I want to create a message now  

I'm back in the world of the same sort of thing  I did with the with the topic that comes in there   and you'll see that I've got all these different  sort of variables that are coming from the output   response so if I just wanted to have the wind  direction I could put that in there but let's  

just let the AI dynamically create the message  and adaptive card is an option there as well if   you have that skill set so we are going to click  save and hopefully this will be a bit more useful   this time let's refresh this and ask again what  is the forecast for Bendigo today and it should  

just give me that we'll see it pop up on the side  with the conversation map it's going to figure   out that it's got a location it knows that I want  the answer in Celsius and it should give me all of   that information now what we can do is use power  automate to call something so remember before when  

we had our lovely Melbourne pollen situation and  it couldn't read this information here so what I'm   going to do is create a spreadsheet so I have  actually got something that's very basic this   is Excel online so this needs to be online but  you can use this with any kind of um data source  

here but this needs to be I want this to be an  unauthenticated data source so this is a really   simple table it's just got these values in it so  you can see I've just copied the values from the   website they're all low I've just changed one of  them to high because I want to prove that it's  

actually returning a different response and not  just saying low every time the tricks here if you   want to be able to use Excel online this needs  to be actually saved into your one drive and it   needs to be formatted as a table so if you don't  know how to do that you grab that we go to home  

and format as table and you just format it as a  table and give that table a name so you need to   make sure that you've got those things right and  then we can connect this up using power automate   because it can't read this on website so if this  was my real scenario it would be relatively easy  

maybe this could be connected to the data source  where it's coming from if I could authenticate   that or I could just put it on a spreadsheet  and have some automation that just Updates this   spreadsheet any every morning and my co-pilot  is reading from this spreadsheet so let's get  

rid of that we'll go back into here and I'm going  to go back into my actions now and create another   action now this could also be something again you  could choose whether this is just an action that   sits there or whether you have it in a topic where  the topic says caller flow but we've looked at  

topics I'm just going to show it to you from here  uh this is actually one that I've prepared earlier   the get pollen forecast so we're going to build it  again because it's more interesting if you see it   being built so we're going to say let's use a flow  so I can use that existing flow if I've already  

got that in there but I'm going to create a new  flow that's going to open a tab here for power   automate and you'll see what we've got here is  this input and output we want to run a flow from   co-pilot take some kind of input and then give  some kind of output as a response back to co-pilot  

so Runner flow from co-pilot has inputs in it so  we are expecting a text input we are expecting   the person to give us the name of the region so  we remember my spreadsheet here has a region and   a pollen forecast in it so that's a simple as that  that's all we need to do and then what we're going  

to do is in between these two actions is run  a connector to excel online to get that piece   of information so the connector we need here and  the action we need here is the get a row so what   we're going to do is choose the location so where  is this coming from I've just got it saved in one  

drive for business but you could have that in a  SharePoint uh Library as well the document library   then is just going to be one drive the file so we  look up the particular file so we've got a file   folder here I've actually just got this saved on  my one drive in a copilot Studio demo uh folder  

and then we choose the table so remember I said  you had to format it as a table you'll get stuck   at this point if you haven't formatted it as a  table I've got my table in there called pollen   forecast and then which colum am I looking for  so the user is providing us with a region so I'm  

looking for so now it knows the columns in that  table so we're going to choose the region column   and then the value this time now this value is  what is the person putting in I want to get the   value that they entered in this previous step so  we're going to use this little icon here to search  

for things that are going on in the flow so I want  something from the runoff flow from co-pilot step   I want that input that they've put in there which  is the region that's it so we've now run the flow   asked them for the region retrieved that and  now we need to Output the other column which is  

the matching pollen forecast value so we going to  respond to co-pilot we're going to add an output   which is also text that is going to be the pollen  forecast and the value that we respond with we'll   come in here and look that up and that is coming  from that get a row step and it's this one here  

pollen forecast you can see that's coming from  Excel the other thing you want to do is give   this a name I'm going to because I already had the  get pollen forecast in there and like you normally   wouldn't be doing this but I'm just going to call  it something different look up look up pollen  

forecast and we're good let's save the draft  of that and then we're good okay let's publish it give it a second and then there's one more thing I want you  to check so if we just go back here what happen  

s is you've got a connection reference so this  is connected to the Excel online business I've   got a green tick there if it's the first  time you're using the connector just make   sure that that's all properly connected and  authenticated otherwise you're going to get  

errors back over in your co-pilot so now if  we go back into here it will say refresh and   we should see that third flow there we go so  there's the one I had before but this is the   one I've just created so now I can choose that  and this is now going to behave in a way that  

is very similar to when we set up that weather  forec but I've done my own connection here so   the input is the region how will the co-pilot  find it just from the user response and now   the output we might want to edit this output  same kind of concept we had before so we could  

put in here how do we want this to respond  so yes we do want to respond to the user   after running the action and we've got the same  options before so AI can dynamically generate a   message how about we create the message  this time so we'll just say the for cast  

is and then I can just grab one of those variables  so we should be able to find the variable called pollen the output there pollen forecast so  then we should be good to go we'll just go   next so there's the action we've got the input  the output and finish now let's see what happens  

we'll give it a second to uh connect everything  up and hopefully we won't have any err ER is in   here if you are getting value from this if you've  come with me this far give me a comment if you've   come this far not everyone will come this far  and please remember to like and share uh and  

add comments on here to help other people find  this I'm putting a lot of explanation in here   because I think people uh find that helpful  so please uh please add a comment if you've   come this if you've come this far with me and  uh we'll see how we go all right I think that  

oh there we go all right I thought I was going to  have to talk for longer to do this in real time   so now we have got that one in there so now I  should be able to say what is the pollen forecast   for East gband and hopefully this time because  I've got that in my data source ah now this is  

where we need to go through another another kind  of connection here the first time you as a user   use this you do need to do this sort of connection  request so we'll just come in here this is just   one off so we'll just say let's connect that  one and I'm not sure if this is going to be a  

permanent thing or not but it is something that  we have to do at the moment so this is a one off   though once that's done you shouldn't have to  do it again just like building the suspense of this all right come on loading there we go  connected green tick Happy Times close that  

one down and let's retry I don't like the  retry let's oh there we go the forecast is   low all right but let I mean that's working but  let's see it properly working here so we go from   the start here what is the pollen forecast for  East gibsland and it should just come back and

say the forecast is low so there you go so  that's actions there's many other different   types of actions in there you can use all sorts  of connectors there are some Advanced actions   with AI Builder prompts again let me know in the  comments if you'd like additional videos on all  

of those things I'm going to see what people are  most interested in let's do the final thing now   of sort of putting this out into the world so we  can publish this but I'm just going to do one more   thing first part six here publishing and settings  so my co-pilot's name is fine I'm going to change  

the icon I've actually used co-pilot to generate  a little Apple icon here because why not uh and it   needs to be in PNG format so that's it's happy  that's good we can just save that so that will   that will come up something on a white background  it kind of comes in a circle format so don't have  

something that goes right out to the edges cuz  it will get a little bit uh a little bit chopped   off in there the other thing that you can do in  here and if you want to publish this I'm going   to publish this now to a demo website and this is  something that you'll need to do if you want to do  

this for yourself for practice is go into security  and you'll see that you've got these options   here for the authentication so the standard  authentication setup and this is done so that   it's it's easier for you to create co-pilot agents  that are connected to SharePoint but in this case  

we're not doing that I want this to be publicly  available with no authentication so you need to go   in here and say no authentication and then you'll  be all right so if you get stuck with putting   it out there and it won't let you do it please  make sure you've checked that setting in there  

but this is also where you're going to be able to  set those configuration options in the real world   for what you want it to do and from there we are  going to close those settings and hit the public   button and we will publish this co-pilot so  you've noticed I don't have to publish the  

whole way we just do that when we get to the end  while we're waiting for that to publish let's just   have a look at another one here with some of the  channels that are available so you can publish   co-pilots for internal or for external use so you  can publish them into Microsoft teams you'll see  

here you can put them into different customer  service systems third party customer service   systems or you can be publishing them out to  your customers for external use obviously on   your website you can have them working through  twilio Facebook mobile app there's a there's a  

whole lot of things here so I'm going to work  with the demo website here we'll just uh close   this one down and go back to the one that I had  before the options are all available to me here   because I've switched that authentication to no  authentication the other one not all of them were  

available because I hadn't I was setting it to  uh authenticated so it's only going to let me   publish in teams so I want to use the demo website  and this is the easiest one that you can use if   you're just learning because it's just there  so then I can just sort of copy this uh this  

website link and you can put different welcome  messages in here so try out our Healthy Living agent and again with my kind of little apple in  here and then conversation starters you could   put suggestions in here I'm not going to worry  too much about that so we will save all of that  

let's grab a nice fresh browser tab here and put  that one in and there we go we can try this out   live so I can come in here and say something like  what happens if I'm diagnosed with diabetes and   it's going to go out so over the course of this  tutorial now we've got a co-pilot here that is  

connected to two websites an Excel spreadsheet  online a document it's got a topic in there what   do I do in an imerge urgency I don't know if we  ever tested that one uh and so all of those things   are in play other things that you can do in here  part seven Don't Run Away there's more here you  

can actually come in here and create based on a  template so there are a bunch of templates in here   that you can come in and play around with if you  want to see what those things do some of these are   coming soon we have got voice capabilities coming  soon we've got the ability also coming soon to  

create agents that can start to do things on their  own more independently than what I've just shown   you make sure you're subscribed CU I'll definitely  be doing content on that when it comes through   we've actually also got all of these co-pilots  in here so you've got a bunch of things that  

I've mucked around with but you've also got within  here your co-pilot for Microsoft 365 so if you've   got that paid subscription this is the one where  it's $30 per user per month and it's inside all   of those Microsoft applications including inside  teams you can use the skills you've learned here  

to extend that to connect to the other systems  and the brand new announcement of this piece here   which is creating a co-pilot agent inside that  you might Now understand that this is familiar   we've got this field service agent that's sitting  inside teams and look at this co-pilot Studio  

describe that's right where we started from in  this tutorial I've taking you right back to the   start this is why I think this is one of the most  important skills you can learn right now thank you   if you've come all the way to the end with me  I appreciate you thank you so much for watching  

I've got a playlist here with some more videos  on copilot Studio I'm going to keep adding to it   based on the comments and based on the feedback of  what people would like to learn thank you so much