- Copilot In Power BI, it generates adjustable narratives based on what is visible in the report and allows you to fine-tune the tone and focus with prompts.
- Well-designed prompts empower character, rule, and art creation with text-to-image AIs like DALL·E, Midjourney, or Lexica.art.
- GitHub Copilot accelerates playable prototypes, like a retro turn-based minigame, by suggesting code that you control and refine.
Imagine a turn-based role-playing game where a IA the story is woven live It no longer sounds like science fiction: today you can rely on Copilot to build the narrative of your games, use it to program game pieces, and rely on well-designed prompts to shape characters, rules, and scenarios. The key is to cleverly combine the available tools and understand what each one does well.
In this guide you will find a practical and very grounded approach., how to leverage storytelling with Copilot in Power BI environments (to generate contextual summaries and stories), how to design prompts that help you define the game universe, a dose of inspiration with a mini video game project assisted by GitHub Copilot and, also, publishing, privacy and technical operation considerations so that nothing falls through mid-game.
What do we mean by "Copilot" as a narrator?
Copilot for Power BI is capable of generating automatic narrative about what's on a report page with just a few clicks. It can summarize an entire report, specific pages, or even specific visuals of your choice, and it also allows you to adjust the tone and level of detail with custom prompts.
An important nuance: the narrative draws on what is on the canvas of the report, not the underlying semantic model. Translated: If you want it to successfully extract highlights, under-highlights, and insights, it's important to clearly name your visuals and axes. If your model needs improvements to work smoothly with Copilot, review the data model update guidelines.
Even if you don't have editing permissions on a reportYou can generate a summary from the Copilot dashboard. It's very useful for validating whether the story matches what you expect your "narrator" to say.
Storytelling with Copilot in Power BI: Preparation and Scope
Area of applicationThis feature applies to Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service. If you're working in the service and are an author, remember that your workspace must be in a dedicated, paid Fabric capacity to create the storytelling visual with Copilot.
Before you get to workPerform a quick report cleanup. Give visuals and axes clear names, decide which pages should be included in the story, and verify that the filters and segmentations you use represent the state you want to describe (the visual summarizes only what's visible on the page).
General philosophy Copilot accompanies you like a chronicler: he observes the visuals, synthesizes findings, supports statements with references, and lets you adjust the tone with instructions. Think of it as a voiceover in an RPG that explains the game situation based on "what's on the scene."
How to generate a narrative step by step
To make the Copilot button appear in a report You must first select a semantic model. Without that link, you won't see the option.
- Open the Visualizations panel and click the Storytelling icon to insert the specific visual into your page.
- Choose the type of narration and select the Copilot option to take advantage of the new AI-assisted storytelling visual.
- In the creation dialogue, indicate whether you want Copilot to summarize the entire report, specific pages, or specific visuals, and confirm with Create.
- Adjust the scope including or excluding individual pages or visuals based on what makes sense for your narrative “chapter.”
- Read the generated summary and validate that it is accurate and consistent with what was shown; it is good practice to review each statement.
- To refine the text, use “Adjust your summary with Copilot”: Provide guidance on tone, format, or focus (e.g., focus on sales on the back page, or use an epic tone).
- See footnotes To see which visuals each sentence in the summary refers to, Power BI will highlight those visuals on the page so you can see the link.
You can switch between the old "smart narration" object and the new Copilot object. with the icon next to the visual title. No content is lost when changing. Since the Copilot summary body isn't yet directly editable, if you need full control over the text, you can copy and paste it into Smart Storytelling to edit it.
Insertion of the narrative visual object
Copilot's storytelling visual is supported in push scenarios for your organization where the user owns the data, and in secure push scenarios. Other scenarios are not yet available.
| Scenario | Compatible? |
|---|---|
| Embed reports in a secure Power BI site or portal | Yes |
| User who owns the data (embed for your organization; requires licensed login; does not currently include inserting into PowerPoint) | Yes |
| Data-owning application (insertion for clients without login) | No |
If you need to configure the insert, follow the Power BI Embedded documentation to prepare your environment and publish securely to your organization.
Save and re-edit the report
When you are satisfied with the narrativeSave the report as usual. Keep in mind that when you reopen it in the Power BI service, the report will open in Reading view and you won't see Copilot until you tap Edit.
Current limitations and considerations
- Persistence of intention: Copilot saves the selected request (e.g., “summarize sales data”) in the report metadata so that the summary can be regenerated upon upload.
- Capabilities needed in the service: Authors creating narrative with Copilot on the service require a dedicated Fabric capacity workspace.
- Editing the visual object: It cannot be edited directly after generation, although it can be changed by using new prompts. The summary is based only on the selected visuals.
- Scope of the summary: Only considers the data visible on the page at that time.
- Exports: The summary object is not supported when exporting live connections to PowerPoint; static exports do work.
- Quality of a preliminary version: In previous phases, precision may be limited.
- Manual updates- When filtering or refreshing the page, report, or data, the user must refresh the summary object to see the new narrative.
- Interactions: Filters and slicers affect the object; cross-highlighting by visual selection does not impact the summary.
- Visual Compatibility: Not all visual types are supported yet; for example, key influencers are not currently included.
Prompts for creating characters, rules, objects, and environments
Prompts are the remote control of your creativityIn AI, especially in text-to-image solutions, a prompt is a textual description that the machine uses to generate a visual result according to what you ask for.
With ChatGPT you can craft rich descriptions to define characters, environments, objects, and rule systems for your role-playing game. The more precise the tone, traits, and context, the closer you'll get to the outcome you envision.
For images, opt for text-to-image AIs such as DALL·E, Midjourney or Lexica.art: are ideal for producing illustrations of characters, monsters, magic items or locations that bring your turn-based RPG to life.
Character prompt example that you could use with an image AI: "I want to create a character for my role-playing game: a wolf-like warrior with black metallic scale armor and a large two-handed sword. He should project fierceness and defiance, with a cunning and intelligent gaze."
Workshop trickIf you repeat verbs like create or use in consecutive sentences, replace them with synonyms (generate, employ, produce) to avoid monotony and achieve different nuances in the AI's response.
A practical boost: video game with GitHub Copilot
Chris Noring suggests a perfect warm-up exercise: Build a retro-80s-style space battle game where you shoot down enemy ships and keep track of your score and fleet. This idea is a good fit as a prototype for understanding turn-based gameplay loops and scoring mechanics.
GitHub Copilot can help you sketch out features for player turn-taking, enemy logic, or counting and status tracking tools. Think of it like sparring: you call the play, Copilot suggests it, and you review and adjust.
If you want to link related episodes or modules With this minigame, you structure small tasks, for example: basic movement, shooting, collisions, scoring HUD, and finally, state persistence between turns.
Related episodes
You can chain thematic mini-challenges (connecting inputs, visual feedback, damage balancing) to consolidate your playable base with the assistance of Copilot and without losing sight of the narrative that will accompany each confrontation.
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