Configure entities (Customer Conversation) (preview)

[This article is prerelease documentation and is subject to change.]

The Entities tab in the Shared Settings panel lists entities shared across every agent in the orchestration, split into Custom and Prebuilt entities.

Each variable you collect from a user is tied to an entity. An entity is a unit of information that represents a certain type of real-world subject, such as a phone number, postal code, city, or person's name. Entities are used when a question expects a particular type of response.

Prebuilt entities

The Customer Conversation harness supports a set of prebuilt entities that represent the most commonly used information types in real-world conversations, such as age, colors, numbers, and names. For example, if a user answers "It costs 1000 dollars" to a question configured to collect the Money entity, the agent recognizes that "1000 dollars" corresponds to a money type of information, and saves "1000" as a number even though the surrounding information was text.

Entity Variable base type
Multiple-choice options Choice
User's entire response String
Age Number
Boolean Boolean
City String
Color String
Continent String
Country or region String
Date and time DateTime
Email String
Event String
Integer Integer
Language String
Money Number
Number Number
Ordinal Number
Organization String
Percentage Number
Person name String
Phone number String
Point of interest String
Speed Number
State String
Street address String
Temperature Number
URL String
Weight Number
Zip code String
Custom entity Choice

Use a prebuilt entity

  1. Open a topic for your agent.
  2. Select the Add node icon, and then select Ask a question.
  3. Under Identify, select the entity you want the agent to recognize from the user's response.

Custom entities

Prebuilt entities cover commonly used information types. Occasionally, such as when you build an agent that serves a specific purpose, you might need to teach the agent's language understanding model domain-specific knowledge. For example, to build an agent for an outdoor store, you can create a custom entity that gives the agent knowledge of all outdoor product categories.

  1. Go to the Settings page for your agent, and select Entities.
  2. Select Add an entity > New entity.
  3. Select the type of entity you want to create: a closed list entity or a regular expression (regex) entity.

Closed list entities

Closed list entities let you define a list of items. Use these entities for small lists that are easy to manage and that have simple item labels.

  1. In Create an entity, select Closed list.
  2. Enter a name for your new entity, such as Camping activity, and an optional description.
  3. Under List items, enter the values you want to associate with this entity (for example, hiking and yoga), or upload a file listing all the values.
    • Select a value to change it, or select the trash can icon to delete it.
    • Select Synonyms next to a value to open the Edit synonyms panel and expand the matching logic for that value (for example, add trekking and mountaineering as synonyms for hiking).
    • Optionally, turn on Smart matching. When active, the agent uses fuzzy logic against the entity's values, so it can autocorrect misspellings and expand its matching logic semantically (for example, matching "softball" to "baseball").
  4. Select Save, or select Close to discard your changes.

Upload values for a closed list entity

From the details panel for a closed list entity, you can add or replace the set of values and synonyms associated with the entity.

  1. Prepare a text file (maximum 3 MB) listing all values you want for your entity, including synonyms, if any. Use one value per line, with a pipe (|) as the delimiter for synonyms. For example:

    hiking|trekking
hiking|mountaineering
yoga
cycling|bicycling
cooking

  2. Under List items, select upload a file.

  3. In Upload a file, select Append to add new values and synonyms, or Replace to replace all existing values and synonyms with the list from your file.

  4. Drop your file onto the window, or select click to browse to select it.

  5. Review the values and synonyms that appear, and select Add.

Download values for a closed list entity

From the details panel for a closed list entity, you can download a text file listing the set of values and synonyms associated with the entity. Under List items, select download, and save the resulting text file.

Manage entities

  1. Open your agent in Copilot Studio, and select the Build tab.
  2. Open Shared Settings, and select the Entities tab.
  3. Select the Custom tab to view entities you created, or the Prebuilt tab to view built-in entities provided by the platform.
  4. To create a custom entity, select Create.
  5. Use Search entities to find a specific entity by name, or filter by extraction method with the All methods dropdown.
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