Book Image

Democratizing RPA with Power Automate Desktop

By : Peter Krause
Book Image

Democratizing RPA with Power Automate Desktop

By: Peter Krause

Overview of this book

Whether you want to organize simple files or perform more complex consolidations between different Office programs and remote-control applications that don't allow outside access, Power Automate Desktop helps meet these challenges. This book shows you how to leverage this workflow automation platform by explaining the underlying RPA concepts in a step-by-step way. You’ll start with simple flows that can be easily recorded and further processed using the built-in recorder. Later, you’ll learn how to use the more advanced actions to automate folder and file management and enable Office programs to interact with each other. You’ll also get to grips with integrating desktop flows into other cloud environments and further enhance their value using AI. As you progress, you’ll understand how flows can run unattended and how they are managed in the Power Platform, as well as key concepts such as creating, modifying, debugging, and error-handling UI flows. Finally, the book will guide you to use Process Automation Designer (PAD) in conjunction with your frequently used desktop systems to automate routine tasks. By the end of this book, you’ll have become a Power Automate Desktop expert, automating both professional and personal tasks.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Introduction to cognitive services and artificial intelligence

The functionalities discussed in this chapter all deal with AI and machine learning (ML). Before we turn to the individual providers and their functionality, we will first classify the topic in general and consider what benefits AI can bring to everyday life and in the business context.

In general, it can be said that AI can help to recognize structures in text, image, or sound information so that they become machine-readable. Cognitive services hereby refer to a set of cloud-based application programming interfaces (APIs) and tools provided by Microsoft, IBM, Google, and other vendors that enable developers and creators to add advanced AI capabilities to their applications without needing to have deep expertise in ML or data science. The actions offered in PAD by the different vendors provide more or less the same functionalities, shown in the following diagram. Only the naming of the services is slightly different...