Key concepts - Enhanced authoring in Microsoft Copilot Studio

Important

Power Virtual Agents capabilities and features are now part of Microsoft Copilot Studio following significant investments in generative AI and enhanced integrations across Microsoft Copilot.

Some articles and screenshots may refer to Power Virtual Agents while we update documentation and training content.

You can go beyond basic authoring in Microsoft Copilot Studio by taking advantage of a number of advanced features.

Prerequisites

These features enhance and improve upon the authoring experience by letting you:

  • Expand the types of information the bot understands and can parse back.
  • Use variables to retrieve information from one part of a topic and use it in another, to ensure a consistent experience for your bot users.
  • Utilize existing support content from website pages, such as FAQ pages, to quickly create a robust set of topics that can be used in a bot.
  • Allow users to sign in directly within a bot, and then use that authentication to retrieve information from backend systems.
  • Use advanced Power Automate flows to retrieve and send information to other databases.
  • Add special nodes that take the context of the entire bot conversation and share it with a human help support agent.

In this section

Topic Description
Use entities and slot filling Use prebuilt entities, and define custom ones, to expand the types of information the bot can parse.
Use variables Retrieve information for consistent usage across topics.
Create topics from existing support content Utilize your existing web content to quickly create bots and topics.
Add end-user authentication Allow users to sign in from within the bot.
Add actions using Power Automate Connect to existing and create new flows that let you automate and send and receive data.
Trigger hand-off to a live agent Send entire transcripts of a bot conversation to a live agent when the bot isn't able to resolve the issue.