Trigger your Topics in Copilot Studio

After yesterday’s general introduction into developing agents in Copilot Studio. Today I will have a look at the first step of topics, triggers.

Triggers

Triggers, like in Power Automate, start a process. Now in Copilot, triggers may feel slightly different as the process is very much start/stop all the time. But in essence the idea is the same. Something happens and we want to do something.

When we look at triggers we could get our topic to trigger on for example specified phrases.

But there are a few more options available. Within Copilot Studio you could for example add the following trigger types:

• Phrases
• Message received
• Event received
• Activity received
• Conversation update received
• Invoke received
• On redirect
• On Inactivity

Phrases trigger

The Phrases trigger is an easy one. You just have to suggest texts that the user may type and then the topic will trigger.

The above trigger could now result in the following conversation:

So, do we have to predict every possible question? No=, not really. This is where the AI piece of agents comes in. As the agent will understands what is being asked, responses or other actions) can be completed.

Message received trigger

When we want to trigger our Topic when we receive a message in Teams, then we could configure the trigger as follows:

And when we test our agent in Teams and we send a message, we will find our confirmation that we received the message. Whereas if we were to test the agent in the Copilot Studio, we will not see the Received a message confirmation.

Activity Received trigger

The activity received trigger will start your topic when a new record is added to the Activities. So this is typically when your chat is initiated.

Noticed that before you see the above overview of activity, you will have to turn on the Generative AI feature. With and without this feature being enabled the trigger will work.

Conversation update received

The conversation update received happens when users are added to or removed from the conversation.

Invoke received

The Invoke received trigger is activated by other Topics.

So that means when another topic is redirecting to the above topic then it will run.

On Redirect trigger

The next trigger is the On redirect. This triggers when a topic is redirected to.

On Inactivity

On inactivity for 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes this trigger will start the topic.

Next steps

Now that we have the triggers of the topics completed, the rest of the logic following the trigger will be important. Read my other Copilot Studio posts for more details.