Step 5: Adding Topics to Control the Experience - Microsoft Copilot Studio Guide

After adding company information and content to your bot, there’s more you can do to curate your users’ experience with the chatbot. Topics are a type of component in Copilot Studio that allow you to guide a user down a guided path.

A topic is a great way for IT support departments to build in their own messaging when a user asks for help (or a related phrase).

Go to the Topics section and hit Create to set up your first workflow

For your first topic, I recommend using the Create from description with Copilot option:

Give your topic a name, and then instructions on what you want it to do. Copilot will try to build your workflow as far as it can based on your prompt. Here’s an example:

Topic Workflows

A topic is effectively a set of steps that you prescribe when your users message the chatbot with a matching or similar phrase. Copilot Studio has a user-friendly editor that lets you build these workflows step-by-step.

Topic Trigger

Every topic starts with a trigger. This will be a phrase that the bot detects as being similar to what you’ve supplied it with:

You can add or edit phrases to better capture what your users might ask by hitting Edit.

Initial Response

Depending on your objective, you may want to send a message or ask follow-up questions to the user after they trigger this topic.

Hover your mouse over and click the + button that appears between steps.

If you choose to ask a question, you’ll see a window that looks like this. I’ve supplied it with a friendly message along with a multiple-choice question:

The user’s response gets saved as a value that you can refer back to later in the workflow.

Additional steps based on the user’s input

You can then add more steps by using the + icon again. When you set up a multiple choice question, the editor will automatically branch outward so that you can define what it should do based on their selection:

Depending on what the user selected, you now have different steps that the bot can follow.

Closing out a workflow

At the end of a workflow, you’ll want to close off the conversation. This step is important because it resets the chat so that the user can ask a new question, without the context of the previous question getting in the way.

To do this, simply add the following step to the end of your flow:

Adding the End all topics step to the end of your flow resets it so the user can ask a new question.

Other things a flow can do

I highly recommend playing around with the different types of options that are available. You can have the user redirected to another flow, go back to a previous step or display an adaptive card, amongst many other options. I will cover many of these in more detail in future posts.

As always

Save your topic workflow. Go to the Publish page and publish your changes. This will make it take effect within your bot in Teams (not instantly, but typically within half an hour).