Microsoft Copilot Studio

The Microsoft Copilot Studio platform lets you build a bot without code.

For an introduction to Copilot Studio, including basic concepts which will provide you with a better understanding of how to integrate VoiceAI Connect with a Copilot Studio bot, go to Microsoft Copilot Studio overview.

VoiceAI Connect Enterprise supports Microsoft Copilot Studio from Version 3.16 and later.

From VoiceAI Connect Enterprise Version 3.20, you can't create bots based on Microsoft Copilot Studio legacy bot framework (formerly known as Power Virtual Agents or PVA). However, Copilot Studio legacy bots that you have already created are still supported, as described in Microsoft Copilot Studio legacy bots.

Copilot Studio doesn't rely on Bot Framework Composer because all required functionality is built in.

Connecting bot to VoiceAI Connect

You can connect your Copilot bot to VoiceAI Connect using one of the following authentication methods:

Direct Line Speech channel, which uses a token endpoint
Web channel security, which uses a secret key and an Environment ID

Connecting to VoiceAI Connect via Direct Line speech channel

The following procedure describes how to obtain the token endpoint URL from your Copilot bot and then how to configure it on VoiceAI Connect. (For Live Hub, this is configured under the Direct line option.)

Log in to your Microsoft Copilot Studio account.
In the navigation menu, click Copilots, and then select your Copilot bot.
On the toolbar, click the Channels tab, and then select Direct Line Speech; the Direct Line Speech pane appears on the right.
Click the Copy button corresponding to the 'Token Endpoint' field to copy the endpoint URL:

Configure VoiceAI Connect with this copied token endpoint: providers section > credentials > copilotTokenURL.

Connecting to VoiceAI Connect via Web channel security token

The following procedure describes how to obtain the secret key and Environment ID from your Copilot bot, and how to configure it on VoiceAI Connect. (For Live Hub, this is configured under the Direct line enhanced authentication option.)

Log in to your Microsoft Copilot Studio account.
In the navigation menu, click Copilots, and then select your Copilot bot.
On the toolbar, click the Settings button.
On the Settings page, click Security, then Authentication, and then choose the No authentication option:

On the Settings page, click Security, then Web channel security, and then click the Copy button corresponding to the required secret (token):

Configure VoiceAI Connect with this secret key: bots section > botSecret > credentials.
To obtain the Environment-Id, on the Settings page, click Advanced, expand the Metadata group, and then copy the value in the 'Environment ID' field. (This value also appears in your Copilot bot's URL in the your browser's URL field).

Configure VoiceAI Connect with this Environment ID: providers section > environment.

Key concepts

Topics: Topics are conversation flows in Copilot Studio. A topic can be triggered with a pre-defined set of sentences, or from other topics in the bot (see Sending messages).
Activities: In VoiceAI Connect, an activity is a control command sent to VoiceAI Connect and not to the user (e.g., start recording or switch language). For more information on sending activities, see Sending actions to VoiceAI Connect.
Notifications: In VoiceAI Connect, context a notification is a message sent from the Session Manager to the bot, but is not necessarily connected to the current topic (e.g., start conversation event or no user input event).

Currently, Microsoft Copilot Studio supports only the start conversation event. For more information, see Saving channel data.

Sending messages

When sending messages from a Copilot Studio bot to VoiceAI Connect, you can add session params or activity params to the message. For more information, see Changing call settings.

To add one of them to the message, paste the JSON content in the 'Channel data' section of the message:

When asking a question, you can add channel data using the code editor:

After setting the question text and parameters, open the code editor, by clicking the ellipsis button in the top-right corner, and then choosing Open code editor:

The code editor displays the entire topic as a YAML file:

Change the prompt to contain text and channelData:

Add the desired activity parameters to the question:

Sending event to VoiceAI Connect

To send an event without a message to the user:

Use the Copilot Studio Send an event option:

In the 'Name' field, enter the desired event name ("config" in the example) and in the 'Value' field, enter the desired JSON:

Receiving events from VoiceAI Connect

To catch events from VoiceAI Connect, use the event received as a trigger topic.

The event name property acts as the condition for checking the Activity.name (see Saving channel data).

Saving channel data

Call details are sent in the 'channel' event at the start of the conversation (see details in Call initiation).

To get call details, start a new topic, and then change the default trigger to Event received:

The event name property acts as the condition for checking Activity.name (in this case, it's equal to channel):

To save a value, use the Parse value option:

In the 'Parse value' field, use the formula with System.Activity.ChannelData:

To save the entire response, from the 'Data type' drop-down list, select From sample data, and then paste the channelData JSON from Call initiation:

Save it as a new parameter (select the Global option to use the variable across topics):