this video I'm going to show you how to use inputs on topics in copilot Studio this is one of my favorite new features and I think you're going to love it I know what many of you are thinking you're like what are inputs on topics and why do I even care about this and I'm going to tell you why so the reason you care about this is because of the fact that if you have this new capability of having inputs and outputs on topics which is the same sort of concept that we had inside of actions it means that you no longer have to create question nodes in a custom topic it means that you're going to be able to use an llm to be able to go into your entity extraction you're going to be able to go back and update previous inputs so if you are saying you want to order a pizza and you say you want a large pizza and then it asks you what toppings you want and then you say actually make it a medium pepperoni pizza it'll do it and and so this is super super awesome to be able to be able to do that because you didn't have that ability before uh this particular situation so then there's also slot filling and that slot filling is going to now support hierarchal entities because of the fact you're using this large language model you can actually say I want to go from Seattle to Nashville and so it and it'll pick that up and put it into the right input now we can take custom topics and simplify them way down to where you really don't have to author very much to be able to create a very powerful Uh custom topic so let's go take a look so here we are we're inside of co-pilot studio and the new ux and all of that and what I want to do is I want to go into this co-pilot that I've built and let's look at some topics right because this conversation is all about topics and custom topics so when you would build something in the past like this say this schedule a consultation topic that I've created here so that someone can schedule a consultation with a business Expert many of you will be familiar with seeing a conversation that looks sort of like this where you ask a question you record it into a variable and then you go to the next question and so forth right and while this is great because you can say you know um op open a consultation and you could actually provide some context or some uh information as part of that and it would do the slot filling that's great but we can actually do this a lot better in this new world now that we have uh the ability to uh create a topic that has inputs and outputs so so let's take a look at a example of a topic that has been built differently and using inputs as a mechanism so if we look at this and I say the request service what I want you to notice is that I have a prompt here that triggers this so that way I know how to trigger it but then I have I have this and notice that it has some variables in here about the model number and the serial number which but there are no question nodes so how how is it doing this right well not only that if I come in here and I say that I want to request a device repair what's going to happen when I do this is it's going to trigger against this and it's going to ask me for the model and let's say that I come in here and I say uh Surface Pro uh pro9 right and then it's going to ask me for a follow-up question about the serial number but wait a minute I what if I wanted to say something like actually the model was a Surface Pro 8 and the serial number is 555555 444 five5 right right and I hit enter it notice that it updated the model number to Surface Pro 8 and I've got my serial number in here and notice that this filled is all filled out but where did those questions come from right that's and and how did I make it where I went back in the conversation to fill in and make changes to what I had previously said well that's the beauty of being able to have inputs and so if you click on details now you'll see that you now have the topic details which you have the description and all the information on this and you can even see that it's turned on and all of these different things here's the model description and then one of the things that's new is we have these inputs and outputs and notice that I can create different inputs and and if you want to see it that would look like this it'll have a create a new variable and we could create additional variables of information to collect but just a for a simple demonstration on this you can see here that what I've done is I've said I need the surface model I need it to dynamically just fill this in so I'm going to let it figure out all the entities and everything and then on top of that I give it a display name and then I give it a description and again this is like a model description so it's explaining to the cop pilot what this input actually does and that's how it was generating a question to figure out what it needed to collect or ask you to provide this information and one of the things that's really nice about this is that it works just like an actions input and you can also see though that I have a ton of the different capabilities where I can do uh entity validation and all the things that you would do on a question node but I can do it on an input now and you can see here that this is the serial number information and you can see me giving it an example so that the model sort of understands what it needs to do and such and if I wanted to configure yet another one I could just click this button and fill out another one and have created all of this so with this all being done this is going to be super super powerful because think about the fact that now you you're taking context of the conversation you're dynamically filling you're getting the um the ability to do hierarchal uh entities and all the things that you really like everybody that's always been really wanting to be able to do inside a copilot studio and then you also have outputs and as you can see I could Define an output and provide it in I could give a description as to what this is and use an output as well and so again these are super powerful new features a lot of people don't even know they that they're here guys because this isn't a feature that is going to get stage time typically at uh something like build so I wanted you guys to see this because it will literally transform the way that you're building Bots today I hope you found this video super useful today and please make sure you like And subscribe to my channel and if you haven't already go try copilot Studio at aka.ms TR copilot Studio