I’ve already shown you how to get a chatbot up and running using Copilot studio in my previous blog, and we did set up the Generative AI to use information from the Purple Frog Systems website. In this blog, I will show how we can add further resources (other websites and files in Sharepoint locations) and what we can do to refine it.

Where does it live?

After the initial setup of your copilot, you will already have Generative AI set up to be used, with the website you provided as the baseline for this; but where can we see this? It can be accessed in two places: Topics and in the Generative AI tab. Each location has basically the same features, but the Generative AI tab is a much better space to work in, so I will concentrate on that. But do remember that you can find the same features below in the topics tab under the ‘system’ sub tab and then selecting the ‘Conversational Boosting’ topic. A much more long winded route to get to the same resources set out in an awkward way.

Generative AI tab

You will find the tab as shown above on the left hand ribbon on the Copilot Studio. Instantly you will see four areas:

• Public websites and SharePoint Sources (highlighted in green)
• Upload a document (highlighted in blue)
• Copilot Content Moderation (highlighted in pink)
• At the bottom of the tab you will see ‘Instructions’ (seen in final image)

Adding sources

The section highlighted in green is where you can add additional websites and Share point locations. This is up to a maximum of 4 sources, and if using a SharePoint location the files within cannot breach 3mb each (you will usually find PowerPoints in breach of this, but regardless just split these big files into smaller files and they will work!).On a finer point, if you do wish to use a SharePoint location there are some caveats to it’s use:

• When you publish your copilot, the calls are made on behalf of the user chatting with the copilot, using the authentication settings configured in the copilot, which must use manual authentication with the Service Provider type of Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory). You see how to set this up here.
• you should omit https:// from the URL. Recognized SharePoint URLs will be from the sharepoint.com domain
• SharePoint site URLs cannot be more than two levels deep.

If you don’t have more than four documents, and you don’t want to go through the pains of setting up the authentication required to use SharePoint sites as sources of information. Then you can alternatively can use the blue section to upload up to four documents each being no more than 3mb to be used as sources.

If you do decide to use any sort of documentation as a source keep in mind these two things:

• You can use videos or images. Copilot can’t use these, but you can use documents with images in alongside text, the images will just be ignored.
• The documents need to be clean and concise, basically just easily readable. You should be able to give the documents to a person with no knowledge of the topic of the document and they should be able to understand the content quickly and easily.

On a closing point for adding new sources, when adding websites, you want to give the home webpages, as then Copilot can access all sub-pages from there, and you should avoid using websites with forums or comments on as this can cause for irrelevancy in the answers copilots give.

Refining your outputs

The section highlighted in pink, in essence dictates how pedantic your copilot will be. How specific will it be in connecting information in it’s sources to the query presented to it, to then form an answer. This comes at three levels; low, medium and high. If set to low, you will get a lot more answers from your chatbot, but the answers may not be relevant, and if set to high you will get the opposite; not so many answers, but much more relevant.

Finally in the ‘Instructions’ section, you can tell the chatbot what it is and how it should behave. Should it act as an employee of your company or as a third party, should it be polite and courteous, or playful and funny. This is where you set the tone of the bot and clearly set out the parameters of what it is and how it should operate. My advice hear is to give as much information as possible while still being exact and non ambiguous. Explain what you want in simple terms, like you are explaining to a small child.

Summary

To summarise we have discussed the two locations that Generative AI lives within the copilot studio, but I have advised that should only really use the Generative AI tab as it gives all the same resources in a much more useful interface. We then went through the different sections of the Generative AI tab, and how each part is useful in adding further sources to your chatbot as well as refining how the bot will react and perform when quizzed.