Power Virtual Agents: Conversation Booster(preview)

Microsoft announced a new amazing preview feature for Power Virtual Agents yesterday, which you can try out today! If you are aware of how Power Virtual Agents (and most chatbots) work, then you know that usually, when a chatbot encounters a question or response that it doesn’t know how to answer, it can only ask the user to rephrase or connect to a human agent. But now, with the new “conversation booster” preview feature, you can connect your bot to different data sources, such as internal and external company websites! This allows the bot to use the content from the website to generate answers to the user’s question, without needing to create conversation topics or spend additional development time. This means that Power Virtual Agents can answer questions without the need for manual configuration, (like creating topics) giving developers more time to focus on building more complex conversation flows. The conversation booster feature also ensures that the bot’s responses are filtered and moderated to adhere to Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. With this new capability, it’s now easier and faster to create bots that can help customers and internal teams with repetitive queries, such as in human resources, IT, and more!

Website rules

As to be expected, there are some things you will need to consider when connecting Power Virtual Agents to a website , which I will explain here.

• First of all, it’s important to understand the website can have up to two levels of depth (or “sub-paths”) which means www.rsmus.com/industries/asset-management would be valid, but www.rsmus.com/industries/asset-management/details would not be valid. (This URL has 3 sub paths; ‘industries‘, ‘asset-management‘ and ‘details‘, therefor it will not work.)
• Another important thing to consider is that websites that need authentication or aren’t indexed by Bing CANNOT BE USED with Power Virtual Agents. (This includes SharePoint sites, and wikis) This is related to the fact that this feature uses Bing Search to get information from public websites.
• Power Virtual Agents will only generate answers/responses from publicly viewable content on the website, which includes subsites aka subdomains under a top-level site. This means that if you use the URL www.rsmus.com/industries/asset-management/ you are restricting the content Power Virtual Agents can use to the content on websites starting with this URL to generate responses.
  Example: The content on www.rsmus.com/industries/asset-management/details would also be used, but content from www.rsmus.com/services would not be used.
  Example 2: The content on ‘www.rsmus.com‘ will use all websites starting with ‘www.rsmus.com‘, but content from ‘careers.rsmus.com‘ will not be used as ‘careers‘ is a sub domain under the top level domain ‘rsmus.com‘. If you are using the website without the ‘www’ part of the URL, ‘rsmus.com then ‘careers.rsmus.com‘ will be included as it sits “under” the top-level domain rsmus.com.

To simplify what I just wrote above, this comes all down to this:

• If you set the URL in PVA to www.rsmus.com/industries/asset-management,  all websites starting with www.rsmus.com/industries/asset-management will be included 
• If you set the URL to www.rsmus.com all sites starting with www.rsmus.com will be included
• If you set the URL to rsmus.com all sites containing rsmus.com will be included (I.E careers.rsmus.com, www.rsmus.com, www.rsmus.com/industries, etc.

More details on websites and URL’s can be found here.

Now keep in mind that this doesn’t mean that makers won’t have to create topics anymore in Power Virtual Agents. The way this works is that when someone interacts with the bot, Power Virtual Agents first looks at the topics to see if there is an existing topic the customer can be redirected to. If the bot can’t find a topic, it will start to search the website that was configured in PVA to generate an answer.

Enable the preview

First of all you’ll need a Power Virtual Agents account (duh!) if you don’t have this, you can sign up for a trial at the PVA introduction website by clicking on the ‘Start Free’ button. This preview works in conjunction with the existing preview for Power Virtual Agents, which has the new authoring canvas experience and lots of other things. For more information, take a look at this article I wrote on this topic. Make sure you use the preview version of Power Virtual Agents ‘Try the unified canvas(preview) tile when creating a new bot.

Once the bot has been created you’ll notice the name of the bot has the word ‘preview’ added at the end when you open it. If your bot has this, you can now enable the ‘Boost Conversations’ preview. Keep in mind that you won’t be able to publish the bot once you enable the preview feature. You can do all of the testing in the test bot to see if and how it works. Open the bot and navigate to the settings area on the sitemap (left side of the screen). Click on AI capabilities to open the AI capabilities page. Below the AI Capabilities section on the page you’ll see the ‘Boost conversations coverage (preview)’ section.

Here you’ll need to enter a website address and check the box to turn on the feature. Under ‘bot content moderation’ you’ll notice there are three different settings here. The higher you set this too, the more relevant the bot’s answers will be. The lower level of moderation will have Power Virtual Agents produce more answers. If you click on the drop down you’ll see what each individual option means. Once you entered the website and set the bot moderation, all you have to do is scroll back up and click on the ‘save’ button on the top. Give it a few mins, and start testing!! For a demo of this preview feature, take a look at the YouTube video below. I hope you enjoyed reading this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!