Introduction to Power Virtual Agents

 Introduction to Power Virtual Agents 

What is Power Virtual Agents

Over the past few years, it has become increasingly easier to create powerful chatbots with little to no code. Now almost anyone can quickly create a deploy a chatbot with ease. Power Virtual Agents is a premium add-on to the Power Platform that allows you to create and deploy such bots.

What you can do with a virtual agent

• Empower your teams by allowing them to easily build chatbots themselves without needing intermediaries, coding, or AI expertise.
• Reduce costs by easily automating common inquiries and freeing human agents time to deal with more complex issues.
• Improve customer satisfaction by allowing customers to self-help and resolve issues quickly, 24/7 using rich personalized bot conversations.

Components of Power Virtual Agents

Topics-In Power Virtual Agents, a topic that defines how a chatbot conversation plays out. You can author topics by customizing provided templates, create new topics from scratch, or get suggestions from existing help sites. 
A topic has trigger phrases—these are phrases, keywords, or questions that a user is likely to type that is related to a specific issue—and conversation nodes—these are what you use to define how a chatbot should respond and what it should do.

Entities-A big part of chatbot conversations in Power Virtual Agents is natural language understanding, which is the ability for the AI to understand a user's intent. 

Prebuilt entities-Out of the box, Power Virtual Agents comes with a set of prebuilt entities, which represent the most commonly used information in real-world dialogs, such as age, colors, numbers, and names.

Custom entities-The prebuilt entities cover commonly used information types, but on some occasions, such as when building a chatbot that serves a specific purpose, you will need to teach the chatbot's language understanding model some domain-specific knowledge.

Actions-You can enable your chatbot to perform an action by calling a Microsoft Power Automate flow. Flows can help you automate activities or call backend systems.

Publishing-With Power Virtual Agents, you can publish chatbots to engage with your customers on multiple platforms or channels. These include live websites, mobile apps, and messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams and Facebook.
After you have published at least once, you can connect your chatbot to additional channels.
Each time you want to update your chatbot, you publish it again from within the Power Virtual Agents app itself. This will update the chatbot across all the channels where you've inserted or connected your chatbot.