Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

The copilot studio has by default two welcoming topics: one for the start of the conversation in Teams (and is sent only after the bot is installed by the user) and another for the "hi, hey, good morning" etc interactions.

What I'm interested is sending a welcoming message for whatever the first received, most user don't greet the bot before asking their question, so I would like to send a "hi, nice to see you, I can be use to search blah blah blah" and then the answere to the question.

I tried to set a instruction for that, I'm using generative orchestration, but I doesn't work, in fact my bot is not performing well in Teams as in is not following the instructions and it's retrieving the wrong answers from wrong knowledge sources (I'm using multi agents and sharepoint sites) but this post is not about this haha.

Can anyone help me building this welcoming topic?

Categories:

Building Copilot Studio chatbots in Microsoft Teams

Hello ID-21031416-0!

That's an excellent question. It's a common challenge to ensure a user gets a proper welcome and orientation, especially when they dive right into their query without a preliminary greeting. Your goal to have a welcoming message appear before the answer to the first question is a great way to improve the user experience.

You're right that using agent instructions for this isn't the intended method, particularly with generative orchestration, which focuses more on the AI's personality and response constraints rather than programmatic flow control. The default welcome topics are also limited, as they are tied to specific triggers like the conversation starting or the user saying "hello".

To achieve what you're looking for, you need to create a mechanism that "intercepts" the very first user message of a session, displays your welcome, and then proceeds to answer the user's actual question. Here’s a reliable way to build this.

Create a Welcoming Topic for the First Interaction
This approach uses a conversation-scoped variable to track whether the welcome message has been sent. This ensures it only appears once per conversation.

Modify the "Conversation Start" System Topic: This topic is key to initializing your logic.
Navigate to Topics and under the System tab, select Conversation Start.
Inside this topic, right after the trigger, add an action to Set a variable value.
Create a new variable, let's call it Conversation.isWelcomeSent, and set its scope to Conversation. Set its initial value to false. This variable will act as our memory for the session.
Update the Standard "Greeting" Topic: You should also update the regular greeting topic to include this logic so users who do say "Hi" don't get a double message later.
Open the Greeting topic from the System topics list.
Add a Condition node that checks if Conversation.isWelcomeSent is false.
If it is false, show your full welcome message ("Hi, nice to see you..."). Then, immediately after, add a Set a variable value action to change Conversation.isWelcomeSent to true.
If the condition is true (meaning the welcome was already sent), you can have it give a shorter reply or no reply at all before ending.
Create a New "Catch-All" Welcome Topic: This is the most important part for your use case where the user asks a question directly.
Create a new topic called something like "Initial Interaction Handler."
Set this topic's priority to High (e.g., 8 or 9) to ensure it's evaluated before the generative AI tries to answer the question directly.
For the trigger, instead of specific phrases, select Generative answers as the trigger type if available, or use a wide range of common question-starting phrases. However, the most robust method is to use a condition that checks for the first message.
Inside the topic, add a Condition node immediately after the trigger. The condition should be: Conversation.isWelcomeSent is false.
If the condition is met (it's the first interaction), add a Message node with your welcome text: "Hi, nice to see you, I can be used to search blah blah blah."

Immediately after the message, add an action to Set a variable value and update Conversation.isWelcomeSent to true.

Finally, and this is crucial, add a Redirect node to send the user to the Conversational boosting system topic. This passes the user's original message back to the generative orchestration engine to be answered, but only after your welcome message has been displayed.

By using this pattern, any message the user sends first will be caught by your high-priority topic, display the welcome message, and then be passed along for an answer.

Regarding your other issue with the bot's performance in Teams—that is a noted complexity. Generative orchestration can sometimes behave differently across channels, and its performance heavily relies on the quality and configuration of your knowledge sources. Ensuring your SharePoint sites are indexed correctly and that your agents are configured with the right knowledge scope is key to improving that accuracy.

I hope this helps you build the welcoming experience you're looking for!

Best Regards,
Jerald Felix