In this blog I will give a quick run through about how to hit the ground running with a chatbot built off your or your customers data!

Introduction

Unless you’ve been living under a rock in 2023, then you will be well aware of Microsoft’s massive investment in Open AI which has brought with it a massive influx of ‘intelligent’ solutions now being available in there offering. One of these is CoPilot, which comes in a few varieties depending on application, But we will be talking about Copilot studio in particular which allows us to create chatbots based on our own custom data!

What is CoPilot Studio?

In a nutshell Copilot studio is Microsofts upgrade (following the significant investments in generative AI and enhanced integrations by Microsoft) from Power Virtual Agents (if you’re familiar with that) with off the Virtual agent capabilities now being in the Copilot studio. Copilot studio allows you to create powerful AI-powered copilots for a range of requests—from providing simple answers to common questions to resolving issues requiring complex conversations. Engage with customers and employees in multiple languages across websites, mobile apps, Facebook, Microsoft Teams, or any channel supported by the Azure Bot Framework.

Why should you use it?

What has really attracted me to the tool is the ease of use. The technology has come on leaps and bounds after the last 1-2 years, in regard to the integration of large language models in the Microsoft stack, as until now, it was still awkward to set up an intelligent chat bot and required good knowledge of the area as well as a bit of coding. With the studio, if you have a well formatted website as source material, you can have an intelligent chatbot which you can expose to customers within the space of a few minutes (zero lies). This is in addition to the ease of exposing the bots now, which is through various well know channels such as:

• Teams
• Skype
• Slack
• Facebook
• Websites

What’s the cost?

Microsoft’s current pricing for Copilot Studio is £164.40 (currency, country, and regional variant factors as this is converted from the dollar amount) can vary based on per user per month. There is no apparent limitation on the amount of chatbots you can have per user, there is a limit on the number of messages sent to the chatbot per month. This is currently 25,000 , where a billable message is ‘a request or message sent to the copilot/bot triggering an action and/or response’

How to do it

This is probably the easiest part and will take the best part of two minutes to give you a Chatbot which is functional! At the time of writing this you can still get a Copilot license on a free trial, so the licensing is as simple as making a Microsoft account to use. You will then come to the following screen (obfuscated as I have work clients in there). You will want to click ‘New copilot’.

We can then do the set up for Copilot:

We give it a name, select a language for the bot ( most of European and the Major Asian languages are currently available), and then give a source for the generative AI which is in the form of a website (my current employer as I have to ask a lot less people for permission then). Then click create and give it a minute to set up and you’re bot is now ready to answer questions based on the source material within the studio window.

I will be looking to put out more blogs over the next few months on how we can take these basal copilots and enhance them!