This feature will allow the use of the Microsoft Copilot Studio to extend Copilots using REST APIs.

This provides a no-code approach to accessing data sources that do not have a connector.

Makers will be able to provide the APIs, provide authentication details (using Noauth/Auth2.0), select the actions they wish to include, and test/publish the action. Additional authentication methods will be available.

Microsoft Copilot Studio allows you to connect to consumer and enterprise audiences on a variety of channels. In conjunction with the Azure Communication Services, Copilot Studio is introducing support for WhatsApp, SMS through Communication Services, and Communication Services Chat, a multipoint chat service.

You can provision an Azure Communication Services resource, and then bring it to Microsoft Copilot Studio where you can connect your copilot to these new channels.

This feature integrates the benefits of the power platform catalog to Microsoft Copilot Studio, enabling administrators to discover, install, and manage agents across power platform dataverse environments.

Before installing an agent, administrators can review and make corrections to the configurations, connections, and environment variables associated with the agent.

Installation status, details, and results can be tracked without deviating from the underlying work.

Admins and Makers can connect to third-party data sources using prebuilt extensions. Extensions combine connectors, topics, flows, and configuration files to quickly allow agents to access third-party data for domain-specific use cases such as prospect to cash, configure price quote, benefits and compensation, and IT helpdesk.

This feature allows makers and admins to unpublish a previously published Copilot connector.

Copilot connectors allow makers to connect actions and activities from other services to Microsoft 365 Copilot. However, connectors may need to be disabled in certain scenarios. For example, the content or data being connected to is out of date, your business is no longer using a specific service, or you need to take it offline to make updates to the connector's configuration.

A maker can select a connector and unpublish it to return it to its draft state and prevent it from being shown as ready and usable in Microsoft 365 Copilot. When a published connector is returned to a draft state, its associated solutions will also be updated. Draft solutions can either be edited and published, or deleted.

Admins in the environment can unpublish any connectors present; makers can only unpublish the connectors they own.

This applies to all Microsoft 365 Copilot agents, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. It doesn't apply to custom agents created in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

You can use out-of-the-box Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio to create knowledge and take action for your agents. With this feature, you can create a single connector that can be used for both connecting to knowledge sources and taking action.

Knowledge is retrieved from Microsoft 365 Graph to provide richness in responses by including productivity data along with business data from connected third-party systems.

Using a single connection means:

• You can use a single connection for both knowledge and actions by combining the functionality of Power Platform connectors and graph connectors into Copilot connectors.
• You will no longer need admin intervention to set up a connection with graph capabilities.
• You will have the same access to view and modify information through a Copilot agent with Copilot connectors as they would if they were logged directly into the third-party system.

Microsoft Copilot Studio now allows you to use your own customer manager encryption keys (CMKs, hosted in Microsoft Azure Key Vault) to govern how Copilot Studio encrypts your copilot content.

By using customer managed encryption keys (CMKs), you can ensure that any data provided to your agent by your users, and the data you provide to Microsoft, is encrypted both with Microsoft-owned keys as well as your own keys. You maintain control of your keys, providing you further protection over the security of your data and ensuring you have control over how your data is stored at rest.

Key capabilities include:

• Hosting with Azure Key Vault to manage your keys, lifetimes, and rotation periods.
• Encryption of all of your content, including copilot topics, settings and configurations, and conversation transcript data.
• Rotation of CMKs.
• Revocation of access, if necessary.

The Public Preview for December will support enabling CMKs for environments that currently don't support CMKs.

With enhanced visibility into how actions are being utilized within an agent, you can leverage analytics to drive actionable insights. This visibility allows you to understand usage patterns, identify areas for improvement, and optimize performance. By analyzing this data, you can make informed decisions, proactively address issues, and continuously refine your strategies to enhance user experience and operational efficiency.

The metrics provided will include answer rate, action usage rate, and error rate, giving you a comprehensive view of how users are interacting with actions.

Additionally, there will be a detailed breakdown of errors, allowing you to pinpoint specific issues and address them effectively. You can view how many times the extension was used by users in their organization over a period of time, providing valuable visibility as they iterate on the extension built. This experience will be available for connector, prompt, and REST API extensions.

By analyzing how often each action is used, which sources are utilized, and the error rates, you can improve the agent's effectiveness and reliability, leading to better user satisfaction and business outcomes.

This feature brings analytics specific to knowledge curation in Copilot Studio.

When working with knowledge sources in Copilot Studio, you can see valuable insights into the performance of your individual knowledge sources. You can view detailed metrics for the following, directly from the knowledge page in Copilot Studio:

Knowledge source usage: This metric shows the frequency of use for each knowledge source, helping you understand which sources are most popular or effective. Answer rate: This metric indicates the percentage of queries that were successfully answered using the knowledge sources, providing insight into their accuracy and reliability. Error rate: This metric tracks the number of errors encountered, allowing you to identify and address any issues with the knowledge sources.

By analyzing these metrics, you can make informed decisions to improve the performance and effectiveness of their knowledge sources.

Without writing any code, you can create Copilot agents directly from your conversations with Microsoft 365 Copilot, both on https://microsoft365.com/chat and in the Teams app. Copilot agents can easily be tailored by employees in your organization to fulfill specific use cases and scenarios, based on your organization's objectives, guidelines, and branding.

You can build within the familiar Microsoft 365 environment you know, without needing to learn Power Platform concepts or new apps.

With just a few clicks, you can create, share, and customize their Copilot agents. For example, you can connect to other knowledge sources to pinpoint the information Copilot should use to generate responses and act.

Users can share their Copilot agents with other employees, and admins can use security governance controls within Copilot Studio, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 to ensure business data is kept within their business.

For further customization, creators can open their Copilot agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio to take advantage of the full suite of advanced copilot authoring and publishing capabilities.

To streamline the process of building an agent, we are introducing key improvements to Copilot Studio's debugging tools. These capabilities will be turned on by default and will enhance the existing test chat experience with improved diagnostics such as the steps your agent took to respond to a message, any errors encountered, and suggestions to resolve an issue. By surfacing this information, we aim to provide more visibility into your agent and reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot.

Microsoft Copilot Studio is a capable authoring environment for makers of all sorts to create sophisticated conversational assistants using generative AI and more traditionally authored topics. As organizations create and deploy more copilots, being able to reuse common building blocks, such as topics, across copilots and, for SIs/ISVs, across instances is a necessity.

Copilot Studio allows customers to export and import topics across copilots and across environments to facilitate this reuse of content and accelerate the multi-copilot authoring environment.

This feature improves how you can test and improve you actions when building agents:

Enhanced testing experience: By providing clear and actionable testing information, you can easily understand and implement the necessary steps without confusion. This ensures you can maintain the context of your ongoing tasks in Copilot Studio or Microsoft 365, leading to a more seamless workflow.

Debugging and recommendations: Features such as plugin run history, in-line recommendations, and workflow visibility are invaluable. These tools help you trace issues, understand exceptions, and make effective improvements to your actions. This comprehensive approach to debugging ensures that any problems are quickly identified and resolved, enhancing the overall efficiency of the development process.

Simulated test data: Creating a set of test data allows you to verify the functionality of your actions in a controlled environment. This step is crucial for ensuring correctness and reliability before live deployment. By testing in a simulated environment, you can confidently deploy your solutions, knowing they have been thoroughly vetted for any potential issues.

You can now leverage Microsoft Purview to audit user interactions with agents created with Copilot Studio.

Copilot Studio logs user interactions with generative AI, which are then surfaced in Purview. These logs can provide context for the analysis and usability of conversations or agents, such as which knowledge sources were used and the text transcript of the conversation.

Initially, only activities of authenticated users will be supported.

Enhance your voice enabled copilots with generative answers optimized for voice-based conversations.

This feature allows your copilot to search across different data sources and return concise responses formatted for text-to-speech (TTS), without the need to manually author any topics. It uses the same authoring configurations and runtime integration, including responsible AI checks, as the core generative answers technology in Copilot Studio, with only the proprietary prompt instructions differing.

This feature will be available across the same geographical regions as the core generative answers functionality and in all 26 voice-optimized locales in Copilot Studio.

Using Power Apps enterprise you can leverage Dataverse tables to configure dynamic key values for your agent. Such examples include store locations, transfer numbers, broadcast messages, and lines of business. Through the management of these bot rules, business administrators can enhance operational agility and swiftly adapt the IVR flow to their immediate business needs. Utilizing Power Apps circumvents the need for direct modifications to the bot’s logic which in turn eliminates the time associated with standard testing and deployment procedures.

You can set up your Power Apps integration with Copilot Studio in a few simple steps:

1. Create and configure your Dataverse table in Power Apps.
2. Create an application in Power Apps to support the administration of your data.
3. Set up an action in Copilot Studio to connect your Dataverse table to your agent.

Once your application is established, business administrators can directly add, update, and delete key data values and seamlessly publish to the live agent environment. The data associated with the agent will be cached to ensure there is no latency or disruption to the end users.

Microsoft Copilot Studio incorporates native voice authoring capabilities when used with the Voice channel in Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service integrations.

These capabilities include:

• Dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) input, including single and multi-digit processing so users can use their phone keypad to interact with the bot.
• Silence detection for prompts, including retries and reprompts, and configurable actions on no response.
• Barge-in control for determining whether the bot can be interrupted or not.
• SSML support so you can configure how the bot sounds on a per-message basis, including playing audio files to the user in place of text-to-speech.
• Long running operation latency message.
• Enhanced speech recognition based on bot content.