Building a chatbot using Microsoft Copilot - the no code way

By now, you must have seen chatbots on almost every business website and even forums. With generative AI, the chatbots are now faster and better. You no longer have to worry about outdated information, training your chatbots for a long time, or creating a knowledge base from scratch.

In this article, I will introduce you to Microsoft Copilot and show how you can build a chatbot that fetches data directly from a website.

What is Microsoft 365 copilot?

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered tool that works with Microsoft 365 apps to help users be more productive and creative. It combines large language models (LLMs) with an organization's data to provide real-time assistance.

It includes features like:

• Chat with text, voice, and image capabilities

• Image creation in Designer

• Web grounding

• Use of plugins and Copilot GPTs

Preparing to build the chatbot

Building the chatbot is fairly easy using the Copilot Studio, and the only prerequisite you need is to have a Microsoft 365 subscription. If you are a developer like me, you can sign up for the Microsoft 365 developer program for free. Along with Copilot Studio access you also get a tonne of other benefits.

So what are we building today? A chatbot that can help you answer banking related queries. For this demo, I have used State Bank of India. Depending on your use case, you can make the required changes.

This is how the information flows 👇

Steps to build the bot

1. Sign in to Microsoft Copilot Studio.

2. Click on the +Create option from the left pane and choose New Copilot. Depending on your use case, you can also start with a template.

   

3. Once you click on New Copilot, you get to see a screen as shown in the image below. The click on Skip to configure to add details for your chatbot.

   

4. Add a name for the copilot, add required description, and instructions and then add the knowledge source. You will get multiple sources as options, but for this demo, choose Public websites and add the link to the website that will act as knowledge base for your bot.

   

5. Once you have filled in all the details, this is how it will look 👇. The click on Create to create the conversational chatbot.

   

6. As a final set before publishing it to various channels, test the bot with various queries and see if it responds correctly.

   

Extending your Copilot

Now that we have built a chatbot, let us take it a step ahead, and ask it to collect information such as full name, email address, and phone number. To do that, you need to build a flow. Microsoft Copilot has Power Automate inbuilt and it can be easily done with the help of Copilot.

1. Go to the Topics from the menu bar and click on Add a topic.

2. You have two options: Create from blank or Create a description with Copilot.

3. To make it simple, choose Create a description with Copilot and fill in the details such as:

   • Name a topic to: Book a call with an agent

   • Create a topic to:Collect a user's full name, email, and phone number

4. Then click on Create and the topic gets created for you.

   

   You can make more updates such as:

   • Updating the trigger phase

   • Summarizing the information gathered from the user. You can do this by clicking on the Copilot option as shown in the image below.

Conclusion

In this brief article, you learnt what is Microsoft Copilot and how you can build a custom copilot for your business needs using no code. In the next article, we will learn how we can build it the pro code way.

Some resources that can help you get started:

• Create Power Platform solutions with AI and Copilot

• Create Copilots with Copilot Studio