Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 21 Mar 2023

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From YouTube: Introduction to the Copilot in Power Virtual Agents

Description

In this 14-minute developer focused demo, Gary Pretty shows how you can build and iterate a working topic for your Bot in minutes. Start with an out-of-the-box bot, then select to add a topic using Copilot. Enter a topic name and simple description and let Copilot generate trigger phrases, conditions, question nodes, message variations, output variables, and json for Adaptive Cards. Go try this in the unified authoring canvas preview today.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform Community call recorded on March 21, 2023.

Demo Presenter
• Gary Pretty (Microsoft) | @GaryPretty

Supporting materials
• Article - Copilot in Power Virtual Agents: Next-generation AI assists bot building with natural language | https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com/blog/copilot-in-power-virtual-agents-next-generation-ai-assists-bot-building-with-natural-language/
• Article - Announcing Copilot in Power Virtual Agents! | https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/News-Announcements/Announcing-Copilot-in-Power-Virtual-Agents/td-p/2064331
• Demo – Boost your conversations in Microsoft Teams with Chat GPT AI and Power Virtual Agents – Dewain Robinson (Microsoft) | @Dewain76
• Preview - Create (and edit) with Copilot (preview) | https://learn.microsoft.com/power-virtual-agents/nlu-authoring

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/community/home

A

Foreign delighted to be here to talk to you about the new co-pilot feature in power, virtual agents. So just to recap what Dwayne was talking about last week, we have actually announced two GPT powered features within power virtual agent in the last. What 10 days and the first one is Boost conversations, which was the demo last week boost conversations for those of you who aren't familiar is the ability for you to you know when you build a bot, you have to add topics for every single thing.

A

You want the uh the bot to do or may be connected up to some kind of external knowledge base, which then you need to manage and make sure it's kept up to date. Etc and one of the biggest problems and biggest hurdles to value is the fact that your Bot is not that useful right out of the box.

A

You can make it incredibly useful, very quickly with power, virtual agents and that's our USP, um but actually what if we could make that even better and that's exactly what boost conversations does so now, when you create your Bot, you can add a URL to your website and currently that's available in public preview, and we also have limited previews where you can point to an internal website or even multiple um sources, and what what's actually going to happen in the background is we're then going to if we can't find a topic that you've built to answer your users.

A

Query then we'll actually use boost conversations which will use Bing to search across that website, get all of the sort of relevant information back that it can find from maybe multiple different places on the within the website's content, um and then summarize all of that information with GPT, and it really is truly incredible. What um this feature actually does right out of the box I would encourage you all to you know: go sign up, create a bot, just point it at you, know microsoft.com or your own website and just try asking it some questions.

A

The the ability to have increase the scope of your Bot and the ability for it to respond to almost any query about your business, almost instantly is just phenomenal, so I would encourage you all to try that okay, so, but why am I here this week? Well this week, I'm here to talk about the second feature which we announced last Thursday, alongside all of the other co-pilot news that Microsoft announced and specifically I'm talking about co-pilot in power, virtual agents.

A

So for those topics where you don't want to have the Boost conversations answer where you want a specific use case for your Bot, um you will build a topic in power, virtual agents. Now, traditionally, what that looks like is I'm going to start from scratch.

A

I start with an empty authoring canvas and then I'm going to start to add message: users, questions conditions, Etc to actually build out my topic, whereas Now using copilot I, can simply describe what I want to build and PVA and the co-pilot will build it for me in seconds and then, even after that, it doesn't stop there, because once I'm, actually in the authoring, cameras and I've built a new topic using copilot or even maybe I'm working with one of the topics that I've already built you know months ago in my bot, um I can then continue to iterate using copilot as well.

A

So this isn't just about creation. It's about iteration and the new co-pilot paid alongside your authoring canvas allows you to then continually make changes. Maybe add additional nodes. Add message: variations to your content, Etc and we're incredibly excited about this. Already I was looking at some um figures earlier today and we we think, we've saved hundreds of developer hours using this feature in the few days since we launched so we're in we're incredibly um excited about the reaction to it.

A

So far, so, rather than just talk about it, let's actually jump into a live demo and I can show you what co-pilot does okay, so here, I'm in a vanilla bought a you know, a bot that I've just created inside of PBA, and you can see here that I've still got my few topics that come out of the box. Goodbye greeting start over and thank you and I've got three lesson topics as well right, but there's nothing um beyond what I get out of the box in a bot.

A

So now I'd like to start to add some content. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to head up to this new topic button and now I get two choices. I can start from scratch, which you know is, is still perfectly valid and using all of the awesome tools that we've got in the new unified canvas, you can certainly um get to Value very very quickly.

A

But today, I'm going to choose to use, create with copilot and create with copilot, allows me to Simply, provide two things: a topic title and a topic description, and from that we will go ahead and generate all of the trigger phrases, for your topic will generate any appropriate nodes to essentially give you, hopefully, a fully working topic right out of the box.

A

So let's assume that I am building a bot for contoso Airlines and specifically, maybe contoso Airlines at one of the it's about to enable passengers at a particular airport to be able to check the status of their flight. Maybe find flights Etc. So the first topic that I want to build here and it's a topic actually that when I've been demoing PVA over the last 18 months, I've built from scratch, it's the ability for somebody to check the status of a flight. So, first of all, we'll give it a name check.

A

Flight status and then I need to describe the topic that I want to build, and here I could be extremely vague. I could just say, you know, create a topic that lets the user check the status of a flight, and, if I, do that, we're going to use GPT to actually go okay. What types of information, what types of question would we would a?

A

um Would a user need to uh provide right or we can be more specific and our recommendation is definitely try and be a little bit specific in terms of what you're asking for so here I'm going to just paste in in the interest of time- and you can see here what I've said is I've said: let the user check the status of a flight, collect the airline, but then I've actually gone further.

A

I've said choosing from airlines that fly from Terminal 2 to Manchester UK, then so I'm using the power of GPT and the fact that it has um knowledge of the sort of wider world, then I can say, collect the flight number and the date, and just like that, with one sentence I can hit, create and what's going to happen is just a few seconds, hopefully we'll be taken to the new unified authoring canvas where I would land if I was creating a topic from scratch, but instead of starting from scratch, what I'm actually presented with is an entire topic.

A

You can see here that it's created appropriate trigger phrases for me all generated by a GPT, using the context of just that description and the title. So you can see here what's the status of my flight, can you tell me the status of my flight, but not only that, but it's created. The question knows that I need as well. So it's here. It's created a multiple choice, question node and it's gone off into sort of the GPT model and it's extracted the airlines that fly from terminal to Manchester, which is just awesome right.

A

I mean it just gives me such a head start rather than me needing to build this question myself. It's created the output variable for me on that question as well, and then it's also created those follow-up questions. What is the flight number and what is the uh the flight date? So that's awesome. It's even created a summary message for me at the end, which references all of those variables that I'm going to get back from those questions, so really excited about that.

A

You know, although that's something I could build in a few minutes, it's just a huge accelerator for me. So what else can I do now? Well, you can see here over on the right hand, side that I've got the new co-pilot pane that I mentioned before in the authoring campus and on here I can see well what did I ask for previously?

A

What was the last thing I asked for, and you know what what were the changes that were made as a result of that I can see them in the authoring canvas, so I can actually correlate the two together.

A

I can also see some examples of the types of things that I can say for um iteration command if you're like, if I'm, making changes or updates to a topic, and then here you can see that I can actually now just type what I'd like to do next- and this is it's an important point, this is intended to be used in collaboration with the existing authoring tools.

A

So right now, co-pilot doesn't know about everything that PBA can do, but we've trained it on the Common Core tasks and obviously we'll be adding more to it over time. But some things are simply just more efficient to do by the authoring canvas and some things will be more efficient to do via copilot one.

A

That is a hugely um uh beneficial for authors is when we look to add message variations so for those of you who don't know in questions and messages in PVA in the new canvas, I can add multiple variants to each message so that if a user comes back and visits, my bot again, it's going to pick one of those at random and my part's going to sound a little bit less stale or rigid if I'm, following through the same sort of flow but adding those variations and coming up with different ways of saying the same thing can take some time.

A

Well, not anymore, because now I can say, add message variations to all of the questions. I. Can click update that's going to take just a few seconds. It's going to pass the existing topic that I already have as context into the open AI model behind the scenes, and then it's going to send back, updated, yaml, there's actually yaml that sat behind this topic and you can see here that it's gone ahead and it's added additional variations for me, I could even be more specific.

A

I saw an awesome example, the other day where one of my colleagues was demoing around a a themed hotel, and they said you know they change all of the questions to sound like they're in Old English, um and you know instead of asking for your name, it said who art thou, um and so you know those sorts of things can be.

A

uh You know again an incredible Time Saver, an incredible accelerator, so another thing that you can actually do: yeah we've we've gone ahead and we've actually saved ourselves a lot of time by adding those message. Variations to all of the questions, I can actually scope. My requests as well so I can actually select one or more nodes, and you can see here now that I've selected this multiple choice, node here it says, on the co-pilot pane, it says one node has been selected.

A

What that means is I can now actually just make changes to an individual node. A simple example here would be, you know, add version Atlantic to as an option now. I know. That's not really going to take me long to do via the author in canvas, but it's a good example of how you can scope down your request and say: I only want to change this particular node or these nodes.

A

So you can see that it's added version Atlantic for me there as well the last one that I'm going to show you inside this topic before I finish with something that we added relatively recently is I. Think this summary message is awesome. It's great right! The fact is I'm, going back to the user and I'm saying: okay. Yes, we can get the status of a flight, but I'm actually going to remove this and I'm going to instead say look summarize.

A

The information collected in an adapted card I can go ahead and click update, and hopefully what that's going to do is it's going to add an extra message to the bottom of my topic and not only will it add the message node um and reference the variables that I have on my topic, but it's also built the Json for the Adaptive card. For me, which is just awesome, you know previously, I- would have to jump out into the designer create that from scratch.

A

Whereas now I've got a starting point and if I want to update it, I can take that Json use it in the designer, um and you know update it from there. Okay, so you've seen me there in just a few minutes with all of the exploration create a working topic and something that would have taken me.

A

A lot longer had I tried to do it manually, I'm, going to finish off with one more example, and instead I'm going to create a topic, and this time I'm going to say um I a millennial, that's my topic, title okay um and for the request I'm going to say: let's not do that there we go, ask the user for their age and, depending on their answer, tell them what category they fall into, for example, Millennial, and then also tell them a fun fact about their category and the key difference here is I'm asking it to Branch my logic within my topic.

A

So, let's go ahead and hit, create and we'll see what it comes up with so again just a few seconds and actually what it's done there is it's gone away. It's asked me the question for H and then it's created a series of complex conditions with multiple Clauses in many of those conditions based on its own wider World Knowledge of the different categories for someone's age, and then it's even included messages for font facts depending on what category you actually fall into now.

A

Obviously, in reality this is a bit of a weird topic to have in a bot but I think it's a great example of how we can now really save ourselves. Time I mean this would take me. You know quite some time to actually put together and go and actually find that knowledge and you know, start Gathering those facts. This is just an awesome, Head Start for me, so I think with that I'm uh I'm.

A

All done, hopefully, that's been a good overview of co-pilot and power virtual agents- please please please go try this in the unified authoring canvas preview. Today we can't wait to see what you build. Thank you excellent excellent. Thank you, Gary on that one really really really cool stuff and and and really shows the power of the AI behind it since helping you to be more productive and super super cool.