Hello World to Microsoft Copilot Studio
Following my previous Microsoft Ignite 2023 article, I tried Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code tool to customize Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build my own copilot with my own knowledge base (or Generative AI bot, similar to OpenAI GPTs). My intention is to build a conversational AI bot which can answer some questions about company’s annual report.
Download data source
We need to find some data for our bot. Go to Airbnb investor website to fetch some 10K documents.
Create a Copilot
Visit https://copilotstudio.microsoft.com. Create a Copilot by inputting name, you can use a website to provide data source (e.g. if you want to build a company organization chart bot and you have a website that has those info). However, for this scenario, I will upload the files myself.
Microsoft Copilot Studio is based on Power Virtual Agents (no-code chatbot builder), so if you want to customize its behavior, Power Virtual Agents knowledge is needed.
Upload knowledge base
Once copilot is created, go to Generative AI tab. Select “use generative answers”. As described, Enabling generative answers will add Conversational boosting topic allowing your bot to respond to unknown intents using your connected data sources using the Create generative answers node. Traditionally, you need to add intents to match what questions you expect users will ask, here provides quick way without explicitly adding intents.
If you scroll down, you will see option to upload documents (here I would image more features needed, e.g. from structured data sources). I already uploaded some airbnb files.
Test with Copilot
Sometimes the bot will answer “I’m sorry, I’m not sure how to help with that. Can you try rephrasing?” (which goes to Fallback intent). But after several retry, it will go to “conversational boosting” topic and fetch relevant data and citation back. Since this is preview release, I assume the quality can improve over time.
Test result
Questions answered well
- For what years do you have Airbnb’s annual report?
- What are Airbnb’s top 3 risk factors?
- Compute free cash flow growth from 2020 to 2021
- What was Airbnb’s free cash flow in each of the past 3 years? Please make sure that your answer is correct.
- How much cash and debt did Airbnb have on its balance sheet in 2022?
Question not answered
- What is the overall sentiment of Airbnb’s most recent annual report? Provide some numbers.
Appendix
Noticeable data sources
- Azure OpenAI on your data
- Documents uploaded to Dataverse
- SharePoint (only modern pages)
- OneDrive for Business
Create custom copilots and GPTs
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Use one connected platform
Copilot Studio is built on the foundations of leading conversational AI technologies including Power Virtual Agents, and is interoperable with Azure AI Studio and more.
