In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, effective communication is paramount. Whether you’re collaborating with team members, interfacing with clients, or engaging with customers, seamless communication is the cornerstone of success.
Microsoft Copilot Studio
Introducing Copilot Studio – your ultimate companion in the world of chatting. Copilot Studio is designed to revolutionize the way teams communicate, collaborate, and conquer challenges together.
Copilot Studio isn’t just a chat tool – it’s your virtual assistant. Using advanced AI, it analyzes conversations in real-time, providing instant suggestions and insights to streamline your workflow. Say goodbye to endless searching – with Copilot Studio, the answers you need are just a click away.
Let’s deep dive into creating a virtual assistant using copilot studio for your website.
Step 3: Accept the terms and conditions then start chatting with virtual agent of your website.
Step 4: Chat with website data. Ask any questions. Examples, Briefly tell me about agile tech consulting?
In summary, Copilot Studio revolutionizes teamwork with its AI-driven assistance, tailored features, and seamless integration. Say goodbye to traditional chat tools and embrace a new era of productivity. Build your custom Copilot with Copilot Studio and experience unparalleled efficiency today.
Copilot Studio: Simplifies AI chatbot creation for businesses. Uses: Customer support, sales, employee services, public health tracking, multilingual engagement. Licensing: Tenant and User licenses required for chatbot creation and publishing
What is Copilot Studio?
Copilot Studio is a tool by Microsoft that lets you build and customize chatbots, also called conversational interfaces, for your business applications. These chatbots are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), specifically large language models (LLMs).
Here’s a breakdown of what Copilot Studio offers:
Low-code development: You don’t need to be a programmer or data scientist to use Copilot Studio. It’s a graphical low-code tool that simplifies the process.
Customization: You can design chatbots that fit your specific needs and brand.
AI-powered conversations: Chatbots can handle a range of requests, from answering simple questions to having complex conversations.
Integration: They can connect to your existing data and systems to provide more helpful responses.
Multiple channels: Chatbots can interact with users on various platforms like websites, mobile apps, or Microsoft Teams.
How does a business typically use Copilot Studio?
Microsoft Copilot Studio is a powerful tool that enables businesses to create and maintain AI-powered conversational interfaces called copilots. Here are some ways businesses typically use Copilot Studio:
Customer Support and Sales: Copilots can handle customer inquiries, provide support, and assist with sales-related questions. For instance, they can answer queries about product availability, pricing, and order status.
Store Information: Businesses often use copilots to share essential information with customers. This includes details like store hours, locations, and contact information.
Employee Services: Copilots can assist employees by answering common questions related to company policies, benefits, and vacation requests. For example, an employee might ask about health insurance coverage or how to request time off.
Public Health Tracking: During health crises or emergencies, copilots can provide real-time information about public health guidelines, vaccination availability, and safety precautions.
Multilingual Engagement: Copilots can communicate with customers and employees in multiple languages across various channels, such as websites, mobile apps, and Microsoft Teams.
What about licensing? Here are some key considerations.
If you are creating copilots for everyone, here’s what you need to know:
You need a tenant license for Copilot Studio. The tenant license can be activated in your Microsoft 365 tenant by a Global Admin. The tenant license allows users to create copilots, and anyone internal or external to your environment that you allow can access those copilots.
To publish generative AI chatbots, users creating copilots need to have the Microsoft Copilot Studio User License assigned to them. The Microsoft Copilot Studio User License is included with Microsoft 365 E3 and E5.
Power Virtual Agents (PVA) has been renamed Copilot Studio for Teams. Copilot Studio for Teams allows you to create traditional chatbots in Teams that do not use natural language models with generative AI. Functionality is limited, and chatbots can only be published to Teams. PVA is accessible to users who are licensed for Microsoft Teams.
The tenant license costs $200 per month for up to 25,000 messages. Every interaction an end user has with your copilot or your traditional chatbot created using Copilot for Teams (PVA) is considered a message, but consumption of messages is different between the two:
Copilot Studio for Teams (PVA) consumes one message per interaction.
AI copilots consume two messages per interaction.
If you are creating plugins for Copilot for Microsoft 365, here’s what you need to know:
Users creating plugins need to have the Microsoft Copilot Studio User License assigned to them. The Microsoft Copilot Studio User License is included with Microsoft 365 E3/E5.
Only Copilot for Microsoft 365 licensed users can use plugins.
There are no consumption charges associated with creating or using plugins.
Skip the code, build a business bot! Microsoft Copilot Studio empowers businesses with AI-powered chatbots for customer service, sales, employees, and more. Multilingual chatbots keep communication flowing, but licensing applies. Copilot Studio simplifies bot creation, boosting interactions across the board.
This is a brief overview of techniques used to run Xamarin.Forms apps on iOS from a Windows PC. This will allow you to test your apps on iOS devices without being part of the Apple Developer Program. This simulator testing is valuable and convenient, it is also essential to test your apps to verify that they function properly before deploying them to Apple Store.
Required Tools:
Windows PC, Macintosh Computer, Xamarin.Forms (Installed on the PC and Mac),
Visual Studio 2019 (PC only), XCode (Mac only).
Let’s begin. On the Mac, navigate to “System Preferences” and then to “Sharing.” Ensure that “Remote Login” is enabled and “All users” is selected. Leave this window open as we will need it later.
MAC IDE – Enable Remote Login
Back on the PC, open Visual Studio, and create a new project. Select the “Mobile App (Xamarin.Forms)” template. Then click next.
Create a New Project on Windows Using VS 2019
Continue through the setup wizard as normal until you reach this screen. Ensure that the “iOS” platform is enabled.
New Project Configuration on Windows
Once the project is created, click on the “Pair to Mac” button at the top right of the screen.
Pair to MAC
This window should appear. If your
Mac is already listed, simply click on it and then “Connect.” If your Mac is
not listed, click “Add Mac…” and enter the Mac’s IP address.
This step will likely cause the
most headache and confusion. If you run into any problems, double-check that
both computers are connected to the same network, both computers are powered on
and awake, and that all your software is up to date.
But if everything goes according to plan, your Mac should now be successfully paired to Visual Studio.
Pair to MAC using IP Address
Once we have paired to a Mac, it’s time to run our app. At the top of Visual Studio, click the “Solution Platforms” dropdown and choose “iPhone Simulator.” Next, click the “Startup Projects” dropdown and choose “<yourProjectName>.iOS” Last, click the “Device” dropdown and select your preferred iPhone emulator.
Build Configuration in VS
The final step, click “Run” and your iPhone emulator should startup on the Mac. After a couple of moments, your app should open on the emulator.
iPhone Simulator
In summary, We hope this is helpful to you. Mobile app development is a tremendous market that businesses need to invest in. Aside from publicity, entrepreneurs can use this platform to connect to customers on a personal level and to be relevant in younger generations.
Contact Agile Tech if you want to develop mobile apps for your business so you can improve your communication with your clients and employees. We’ll design it, develop it, deploy it, and maintain it for you.
Using Xamarin.Forms, .NET developers can create mobile apps user interfaces faster. This is done by extending the Xamarin framework with a shared abstraction of the common UI objects of each platform. In this article, I will share more about how Xamarin.Forms work and whether or not this can benefit you with your cross-platform efforts.
What is Xamarin.Forms?
Reports show that mobile apps are projected to hit $581.9 billion in revenue in 2020. (Statista) and this number is still growing. This shows the importance of mobile applications, especially to a business with an online presence. Having a mobile application is a necessity.
Business
owners who do not have a mobile app yet may choose to develop mobile-friendly
websites. You can include design features that are readable on a mobile device.
You can achieve this by building a website that is responsive using Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Stylesheet (CSS), and JavaScript. This may be a very valid approach for your particular
needs, but you are limited on what native mobile device features can offer.
Depending on your needs for access to device-specific features, you could
develop applications in the software development environments provided by each
platform provider, Objective-C or Swift for iOS development, and Java or Kotlin
for Android.
If
you know web development, you may consider going hybrid and develop just a
single code that allows you to run on multiple platforms. You can accomplish
this by having the native web view component on each platform with open-source
SDK such as Ionic. Ionic is built as a set of Web Components, allowing the user
to choose any user interface framework, such as Angular, React or Vue.js. The
only drawback is — as an interpreted language, JavaScript has some performance
bottlenecks so not really ideal for the hybrid approach.
If
you have skills with C# or F#, Xamarin will work best for you. Xamarin allows
you to create an abstraction layer using the native platform and helps you
develop the app in a more common language. While not as robust, it isn’t that
bad as you are able to develop a common language. So where does Xamarin.Forms
come in?
Defining Xamarin
Using the .NET framework, you can create applications across several platforms with Xamarin. You can do the development using Windows or Apple (iOS) operating systems. Everything is accomplished through the Mono framework and allows you to share a common library.
When developing the Xamarin project using the iOS platform, you will first need to create a Visual Studio project. With iOS, you start with an application logic within the project, creating interaction and using the MVC design pattern. All this using the .NET Framework. You can also take this one step further through a shared library project. Using the Windows operating system, you will be creating a .NET project by selecting the Xamarin platform.
What is Xamarin.Forms?
With each project, Xamarin.Forms create an abstraction that provides a common API and allows your shared project to reference native UI objects. Because the shared library can interact and create with the presentation layer, you can then move the user interface into the shared library. Application flow and business logic have been moved to the shared library too, which means that communication with the device has been lost as the platform’s application logic no longer drives the application. Communication through a proxy is needed since the shared logic is not able to communicate with the device features. The image below shows how the library is being shared by both Android and iOS.
Xamarin.Essentials
— a library, works well with Xamarin.Forms. It’s a NuGet package that also
creates abstraction and allows you to communicate features with the common API.
This is a good picture – however, you may need platform-specific logic
developed still. Don’t worry though as Xamarin is extremely flexible. A
Xamarin.Forms application declares the user interface in one or more XAML
files. Here we see a very basic XAML file. Xamarin.Forms can be built up and
referenced programmatically, but for now, let’s focus on the XAML declarations.
Summary
Although Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin.Essentials can be used independently, they also work well together. With Xamarin.Forms, you can get started with developing your own mobile applications. With Xamarin.Forms, you can jump right into the development of your application. If you are interested in a deeper dive into the full Xamarin ecosystem, please contact our team at Agile Tech. We have done many Xamarin applications for our clients. Below are a couple of sample screenshots of our work.
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