Key concepts - Publish your bot

Important

Power Virtual Agents capabilities and features are now part of Microsoft Copilot Studio following significant investments in generative AI and enhanced integrations across Microsoft Copilot.

Some articles and screenshots may refer to Power Virtual Agents while we update documentation and training content.

With Microsoft Copilot Studio, you can publish bots to engage with your customers on multiple platforms or channels. These include live websites, mobile apps, and messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams and Facebook.

After you've published at least once, you can connect your bot to more channels.

Each time you want to update your bot, you publish it again from within the Microsoft Copilot Studio app itself. Publishing your bot will update the bot across all the channels where you've inserted or connected your bot.

Prerequisites

You need to publish your bot before your customers can engage with it. You can publish your bot on multiple platforms, or "channels".

After you've published your bot to at least one channel, you can connect it to more channels. Remember to publish your bot again after you make any changes to it.

Publishing your bot updates it across all the channels it's connected to. If you don't, your customers won't be engaging with the latest content.

The bot comes with the Only for Teams and Power Apps authentication option turned on. The bot automatically uses Microsoft Entra ID authentication for Teams and Power Apps without requiring any manual setup and only lets you chat with your bot on Teams.

If you want to allow anyone to chat with your bot, select No authentication authentication.

Caution

Selecting the No authentication option will allow anyone who has the link to chat and interact with your bot or copilot.

We recommend you apply authentication, especially if you are using your bot or copilot within your organization or for specific users, along with other security and governance controls.

If you want to use other channels and still have authentication for your bot, select Manual authentication.

Screenshot of the Authentication pane showing the three authentication options.

Publish the latest content

  1. With your bot or copilot open for editing, in the navigation menu, select Publish.

  2. Select Publish, and then confirm.

    Screenshot that shows where to find the Publish button in the bot authoring experience.

Publishing can take up to a few minutes.

Test your bot

Test your bot after it's published. After it's published, you can make the bot available to users in Microsoft Teams with the installation link or from various places in the Microsoft Teams app store.

You can share your bot later by selecting Make bot available to others from the Publish page.

You can also install the bot for your own use in Microsoft Teams by selecting Open the bot.

If you selected the No authentication or Manual authentication option, select the Demo website link to open a prebuilt website in a new browser tab, where you and your teammates can interact with the bot.

The demo website is also useful to gather feedback from stakeholders before you roll your bot out to customers. Learn how to configure the demo website and add the bot to your live website.

Tip

What's the difference between the test chat and the demo website?
Use the test chat (the Test copilot pane) while you're building your bot to make sure conversation flows as you expect and to spot errors.

Share the demo website URL with members of your team or other stakeholders to try out the bot. The demo website isn't intended for production use. You shouldn't share the URL with customers.

Go to demo website.

Configure channels

After publishing your bot at least once, you can add channels to make the bot reachable by your customers.

To configure channels:

  1. Select Settings.
  2. In the navigation menu, select the Channels tab.

Channel settings.

The connection steps are different for each channel. See the related article in the list below more information:

Channel experience reference table

Different channels have different end-user experiences. The following table shows a high-level overview of the experiences for each channel. Take the channel experiences into account when optimizing your bot content for specific channels.

Experience Website Microsoft Teams Facebook Dynamics Omnichannel for Customer Service
Customer satisfaction survey Adaptive card Text-only Text-only Text-only
Multiple-choice options Supported Supported up to six (as hero card) Supported up to 13 Partially Supported
Markdown Supported Partially Supported Partially supported Partially Supported
Welcome message Supported Supported Not supported Supported for Chat. Not supported for other channels.
Did-You-Mean Supported Supported Supported Supported for Microsoft Teams, Chat, Facebook, and text-only channels (SMS via TeleSign and Twilio, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Twitter).
Suggested actions will be presented as a text-only list; users will need to retype an option to respond

Important

Users can't send attachments to Microsoft Copilot Studio chatbots. If they try to upload a file (including media, such as images), the bot will say:

Looks like you tried to send an attachment. Currently, I can only process text. Please try sending your message again without the attachment.

This applies to all channels, even if the channel or end-user-facing experience supports attachments (for example, if you're using the Direct Line API or Microsoft Teams).

Attachments can be supported if the message is sent to a skill, where the skill bot supports the processing of attachments. For more information, see the Use Microsoft Bot Framework skills topic for more details on skills.

Next steps

Topic Description
Configure the demo website and add the bot to your live website Publish your bot on your live website, or use a demo website to share internally.
Add bot to Microsoft Teams Use Teams to distribute your bot.
Add bot to Facebook Add your bot to Facebook Messenger.
Add bot to mobile and custom apps (web-based or native) Add your bot to mobile or custom native apps (developer coding required).
Add bot to Azure Bot Service channels Add your bot to Azure Bot Service channels (developer coding required).