Copilot (preview) - first attempts

[Jesse_S]

Hi All --

Late this evening I got an email letting me know I was granted access to the Power App Copilot builder. I've been looking forward to experimenting with this and dived in head-first.

First impressions with describing what I wanted and generating the Dataverse table was pretty cool. I managed to get a good approximation for what I going for. What I was mainly interested in seeing was the extent of the Copilot integration into the Power App as a natural language interface to the data.

Unfortunately, after the Power App was generated I was immediately hit with "Something went wrong. Please try again later." Screenshot below to give an idea of the problem.

I spent some time digging around Power Apps Forums, Reddit, DuckDuckGo, and YouTube, but didn't find anything clearly related. I'm curious if anyone here has seen something along these lines yet and if you have any troubleshooting suggestions.

FWIW, I've spent a fair bit of time here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/canvas-apps/ai-overview

and here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/canvas-apps/ai-conversations-create-app

making sure I'm meeting all the prerequisites.

Thanks & cheers!

[Lebrass]

The vast majority of the data that I use within Powerapps tend to be sharepoint lists, with a few excel on onedrive for business mixed in. So just like you im looking very forward to it starting to work with both of those other sources.  Right now Dataverse tables 'appear' to work though as expected. Or at least they work within the Dataverse tables with sample data added by Copilot when it created the initial app. 

[scottquinnNH]

So far, I am now able to get it to work with Dataverse, Excel, and now SharePoint lists. I just tried it and it worked very seemlessly. It gave me suggested questions and results. Haven't tried other sources yet. 

[fiveAlarm]

Hey scottquinnNH,

To clarify, do you use Copilot to create the app and dataverse table, then once it created add and excel online or sharepoint list as a datasource? 

[scottquinnNH]

No. I created a blank app, added the datasource and then added the copilot component and connected it to the datasource - for Excel and SharePoint lists. 

[Lebrass]

I'm starting from scratch again, adding both excel and sharepoint lists and don't get any better results.
I'm super jealous if sharepoint is working for you.  What is the sharepoint list you're using it for out of curiosity? I've been trying everything from an error tracker, to a document list with page numbers. So far none of that is working, and it will not even accurately tell me how many rows the tables have. Atm, no matter what DataSource i add it tells me there are 5 rows.

[scottquinnNH]

It is a simple listing of projects I am working on at work. Only has a few columns like project name, start date, end date, and project status. I can ask it questions like what is the longest project and it tells me the results. 

I have tried it on larger lists with more columns and not getting results back - but no error messages either. 

I am lucky it is working so I can present something for a POC on the possibilities this can offer us. 

[Lebrass]

I would love to hear from a Copilot product expert just to confirm why we're all getting different results, or why some lists work for some of us, and others don't. But hopefully some of you other posters have some idea's or can report how this has been working for you today as well.  

[Mattw112IG]

So I just got it to work in dataverse.  I opened the power apps monitor.. and could see errors there that it wasn't showing me in the app.  So basically it was saying my prompt text was too big.  I went back and removed all the fields except one.  Then ran it and it worked.  It seems like you can only have like 500 characters or something.  So when I had 100 columns added into the fields, it was passing all that data with each prompt.  By getting rid of most columns and just leaving the one I cared about then it worked.  Although the answer was pretty short and not very descrtive as what I was looking for.  Would be nice if we had some properties to control things like temperature, tokens, etc.  like in the playground.

[scottquinnNH]

I just tried this as I had one SP List that wasn't pulling back any data. I removed a number of columns I didn't need and it now suggesting questions and answering my questions.

It doesn't pull in all records at this point - but enough to see how it can work. 

[gilmara]

This seemed to be the ticket right here! I had it connected to sharepoint lists with many columns loaded. After I clicked on the copilot object and then the Fields link on the right, I removed some columns I didn't need and after I got it down to 16 columns, it started working. You can literally see the copilot object refresh and it will load some sample questions when you get it trimmed down enough. Thank you for sharing!