Stop the Awkward Silence: Signals to Classic Orchestration

Intro: If you’ve used generative orchestration in Copilot Studio, you’ve seen the comforting “thinking” animation while the copilot works. Classic orchestration doesn’t do that out of the box. So when you kick off a longer task—like a RAG lookup or a flow call—the chat can look empty. No typing dots. Just silence. That silence is a UX bug, not a feature. The fix is quick: send a Typing event immediately before the slow step, then add a short acknowledgement message to set expectations. Configuration: Locate the slow step or Topic where you have user feedback on the poor UX expereince (May be based on the user activity we might have logic where the heavy work starts: Create generative answers, a flow, or an HTTP/API call.) Set Event type to Typing. The example below the timer is set as 2100 ( milliseconds) Add a brief acknowledgement message Right after the Typing event, add a normal message to set expectations. Keep it human and specific: “Got it — searching our knowledge base. This ma