Power Virtual Agent Introduction

In this post I am going to do a high level overview of Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agent application. As you probably already know, Power Virtual Agent is Microsoft’s version of a no-code to low-code chat bot. The great thing about this application is that it makes is really easy for anyone to create a chat bot without having to work with a developer. Lets take a look at the components of Power Virtual Agent.

When you first log into Power Virtual Agent, you’ll see a few different options on the left hand side. The middle part of the screen is showing a ‘Get Started’ screen from where you can navigate to several different areas of the application. There is also a link the the Power Virtual Agents documentation, a link to the community and a link to the idea forum.

Topics

Users can create topics for the bot. Topics are scripted conversation paths that can have several branches, depending on questions and the answers given by the customer conversing with Power Virtual Agent. Topics can be configured by using the authoring canvas. Topics can be turned on or off.
When a new bot is created the system automatically creates lesson topics which the Power Virtual Agent administrator can use to learn about creating Power Virtual Agent content. Please note these lesson topics are just for training and not for production use.

Trigger Phrases

Each topic needs to have a few trigger phrases associated with it. Trigger phrases are phrases or keywords customers can type in, which allows the bot to route the customer to a specific topic. It is important to understand that trigger phrases don’t have to be exact, which is where machine learning comes into play. For example if a topic has a trigger phrase called “order issue”, but the user types in “I had a problem with my order” the bot will still route the user to the appropriate topic.

Entities

Power Virtual Agent comes with a set of pre-built entities. We can use entities to tell the bot what type of data to look for when a customer types into the chat window, (email address, money, a person’s name, etc.) but also how to capture that data. For example, there is an age entity, which allows Power Virtual Agent to extract an actual value from the data that was entered in the chat window: If the user input is ‘I’m 19 years old’ the bot will save the number ’19’ as the value. Or if someone types in ‘Five years’, the bot will save that as a value of ‘5’.

We can also create our own custom entities, which allows us to enter a list of items and synonyms for items in the list. These lists can be used to group or categorize words together. For example if you’re building a bot to handle lawn questions, you might have an entity called ‘Lawn Concerns’, with values such as ‘Brown Spots’,’Lawn Pests’, ‘Fertilization’, etc. By grouping these items in one list, it allows the bot to more easily understand the data that is entered.
We can enable smart matching in these custom entities which allows the bot to recognize items in the list even if the customer misspells an item or when they use a similar word such as matching the word ‘job’ to ‘career’.

Authoring Canvas

This is where the magic happens! Admins will most likely spend most of their time here, as this is where the questions, answers, actions and variables for topics are being configured. I really like the user interface of the authoring canvas, although it can get a little crowded if you have a lot of questions with multiple branches. When you start building your conversation, there are different options you can choose from:

1. Each message can be formatted by using the options on the screen. We can also insert date stored in variables within the message. (I.E if the bot captured the customers name earlier, we can use that variable later in the conversation)
2. Displays question from VPA; we can use variables to capture customer responses
3. The action option allows admins to trigger logic from outside VPA, this can be a Power Automate Flow or a Skills action
4. Shows a message to a user, a response it not captured
5. This step will redirect the conversation to another topic
6. Ends the conversation either with a survey or by transferring to a live agent

We can configure individual questions to be skipped so that Power Virtual Agent doesn’t follow the topic script blindly. It will then use all the information it has to decide when to ask a question and when to skip it. For example, if the user provided information earlier in the conversation, the bot will remember and skip asking for it again.

Variables

Variables are place holders where the application stores answers that have been typed in by the customer. Admins can use the variables in a few different ways. The data in the variable can be used in the conversation Power Virtual Agent is having with the customer (I.E Power Virtual Agent asks the customer what their first name is, customer answers their name is Jim, which is stored as ‘Name_Variable’ and responds to customer saying “Nice to meet you ‘Name_Variable’, which will show to the customer as “Nice to meet you Jim“. Variables can also be passed outside of Power Virtual Agent. Admins can call actions (I.E Power Automate Flow) and pass data from the variables to a Power Automate Flow. Power Automate will then run and pass data back to Power Virtual Agent, which then can be used in the conversation with the customer. A good example of this is Power Virtual Agent asking the customer for an email address, querying the Dynamics 365 CE database to see if there is a lead or contact record in the database with that email address, if not then have Power Automate create a lead in Dynamics 365.

Publishing

Power Virtual Agent can be published to multiple channels, like custom websites, mobile apps and messaging apps I.E Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams. Power Virtual Agent admins can use the demo website to test topics after they have been configured and published. This link can be shared internally or externally, but this is not intended as a production site. After several tests have been done, the Power Virtual Agent admin can review analytics related to each individual topic.

Try it now!

I would recommend signing up for a trial for Power Virtual Agents so you can play get familiar with the product. I was quite impressed with how easy it was to start building out the topics and to get up and running! You can get a trial here: https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com

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