Book Image

Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents

By : Nicolae Tarla
Book Image

Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents

By: Nicolae Tarla

Overview of this book

Power Virtual Agents is a set of technologies released under the Power Platform umbrella by Microsoft. It allows non-developers to create solutions to automate customer interactions and provide services using a conversational interface, thus relieving the pressure on front-line staff providing this kind of support. Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents is a guide to building chatbots that can be deployed to handle front desk services without having to write code. The book takes a scenario-based approach to implementing bot services and automation to serve employees in the organization and external customers. You will uncover the features available in Power Virtual Agents for creating bots that can be integrated into an organization’s public site as well as specific web pages. Next, you will understand how to build bots and integrate them within the Teams environment for internal users. As you progress, you will explore complete examples for implementing automated agents (bots) that can be deployed on sites for interacting with external customers. By the end of this Power Virtual Agents chatbot book, you will have implemented several scenarios to serve external client requests for information, created scenarios to help internal users retrieve relevant information, and processed these in an automated conversational manner.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: An Introduction to Power Virtual Agents
5
Section 2: Leveraging Power Virtual Agents on Your Website
9
Section 3: Leveraging Power Virtual Agents in Teams
13
Section 4: Best Practices for Power Virtual Agents

The role of connectors in a Power Virtual Agents conversation

In Chapter 8, Integrating the Power Virtual Agent into Teams, we used an example where we questioned an HR chatbot about our remaining vacation time, and it was able to respond with the exact number of vacation days remaining for the user. We mentioned in passing that we used a Power Automate flow to achieve this.

An important aspect to understand is that Power Automate, just like most of the Power Platform, leverages a large set of connectors to tap into other external applications and perform various Create, Read, Update or Delete (CRUD) operations. The most common one with chatbots is, as expected, Read. We want our chatbot to return relevant information to the user it converses with, and to do that, the chatbot needs to read that information from various sources.

But let's make a distinction between static and dynamic data before we delve into how data is retrieved and introduced into a conversation.

Static...