How to build a basic chatbot

 How to build a basic chatbot

Power Virtual Agents empowers teams to quickly and easily create powerful bots using a guided, no-code graphical experience—all without the need for data scientists or developers.

Create a chatbot

• sign-in with your work email address.
• Next, you’ll choose a name for your chatbot. This can be something generic to your company or specific to the scenario you are tailoring your chatbot to.

• Once you select Create, the process of creating the first chatbot within a new environment can take up to 15 minutes. Subsequent bots will be created much faster.
• After a few minutes, you’ll land on the home page and have an opportunity to play around with the chatbot in read-only mode. You can't save any edits during this time, but you can explore the overall user interface, look at the topics, experiment with the preloaded User Topics and System Topics, and interact with your chatbot using the Test Canvas.
• When the chatbot creation process completes, the banner changes. You now have full functionality in the chatbot and can modify any User or System topic, test out your content changes, or deploy your bot.
• If you have already created a chatbot, you can create a new chatbot by selecting the icon on the title bar to open the Bots pane and then selecting New bot.

Create a topic

• Go to the Topics tab on the side navigation pane to open the Topics page.
• On the topics page, select New topic.
• Specify a name, description, and one or more trigger phrases for the topic.
• Select Save topic to add the topic to the topics list.

Design the topic's conversation path

• In the topic details for the topic, you want to edit, select Go to authoring canvas.

• Power Virtual Agents opens the topic in the authoring canvas and displays the topic's trigger phrases. The authoring canvas is where you define the conversation path between a customer and the bot.
• For existing or system topics, a number of nodes will automatically be created. You can edit these nodes just as you can for other nodes.
• When you create a new topic, the Trigger phrases node and a blank Message node are inserted for you.
• You can add additional nodes by selecting the Plus (+) icon on the line or branch between or after a node.

Insert nodes

When adding a node, you can choose from five options. Each option has a specific node that will be inserted into the conversation path.

You can:

• Ask a question
• Call an action
• Show a message
• Go to another topic
• End the conversation

Publish a chatbot

With Power Virtual Agents, you can publish chatbots to engage with your customers on multiple platforms or channels. You need to publish the chatbot at least once before your customers can interact with it or you can share it with your teammates.

• Go to the Publish tab on the side navigation pane.
• Select Publish to make the latest chatbot content available to your customers. The publishing process will check for errors in the latest chatbot content.