Generative answers

  • 5 minutes

In the past, if an agent was unable to determine a user's intent, it would ask them to rephrase their question. A key differentiator between traditional chatbots and modern agents is how the agent handles an unknown intent.

Use knowledge for generative answers

With generative answers, Microsoft Copilot Studio allows your agent to find and present information from multiple sources, internal or external, without created topics. This allows you to use generative answers as primary information sources or as a fallback source when authored topics can't answer a user's query. As a result, this dramatically reduces the time it takes to create and deploy a functional agent, removing the need to manually author multiple topics that might not address all customer questions.

Generative answers use knowledge sources as grounding data. Grounding data helps to provide more context. For example, when you use an internal data source as a knowledge source, the knowledge source is based on your data, therefore the information presented back to the user is more relevant than generic information for a public facing site. There are multiple knowledge sources currently available with more being added all the time.

Note

There are key differences between classic and generative orchestration, such as how knowledge is searched and the supported data sources.

Generative answers node

The Generative answers node in Copilot Studio allows you to tailor the generative capabilities of your agent within a topic. It provides multiple ways to take advantage of generative AI. There are multiple options that you can work with, including:

  • Add knowledge - Allows you to upload documents and add other knowledge sources that are used to provide real-time responses to users.
  • Restrict knowledge - Allows you to specify which of the knowledge sources added to the agent are used to provide responses to users.
  • Web search - Searches all public websites to provide responses to users.
  • Allow the AI to use its own general knowledge - Searches specified internal and external websites to provide responses to users.
  • Content moderation level - Allows you to determine how relevant you want the answers that are generated to be.

Screenshot of the Generative answers node.

To learn more about the generative answers node, see: Use generative answers in a topic.