What are prompt actions?
Custom prompts give makers the freedom to instruct the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model to behave in a certain way or to perform a specific task. By carefully crafting a prompt, you can generate responses that suit your specific business needs. This transforms the GPT model into a flexible tool to accomplish various tasks.
Prompt scenarios
You can use prompts for various scenarios. Here are a few examples:
- Classify information – enter a large text and assign predefined labels to it.
- Extract entities – have a large text and extract the client’s name, contact person, or phone number from the text.
- Draft responses – a customer has a problem, and you want help with how to respond back to suggest possible solutions.
- Summarize content – extract tasks / action items from a text.
These prompts can be used in multiple experiences, for instance in a Power App, in a Power Automate cloud flow, in a custom agent in Copilot Studio, or in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Prompt action experience
Prompt plugins are automatically available below the Copilot Studio section in the plugins menu in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Prompt engineering considerations
The goal of prompt engineering is to create an instruction that's as specific as possible to get a more relevant response from the GPT model.
A prompt might include the following information:
- The topic
- Keywords or phrases that are associated with the topic
- The tone of the response
- The target audience
If the generated text is too long or contains irrelevant information, adjust the prompt. A good prompt has the following characteristics:
- Clear and concise: It's clear and concise language that's easy to understand
- Specific: It's specific enough to guide the GPT model in the right direction
- Contextual: It provides enough context for the GPT model to generate meaningful output
- Relevant: It's relevant to the task and provides the GPT model with enough information to generate meaningful output
Examples
You don’t have to start from scratch all the time because there are example prompts available for you to start with. Review the following link: