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

Creating a Power Virtual Agents application for Teams

When creating chatbots for Teams, we work directly within Teams.

Teams has gained a lot of popularity and is becoming the standard platform for enterprise collaboration. It offers abilities beyond the standard chat functionality and voice or video conferencing. It acts as a central collaboration hub, having tight integration with the Office suite of applications, as well as a variety of additional services. Besides the most obvious services—such as file storage and sharing, along with versioning control powered by SharePoint—it also allows various external applications to be brought in.

For us to build our first chatbot, we need to add the Power Virtual Agents application to Teams. This is done by going along the left navigation bar to the ellipsis and retrieving the Power Virtual Agents application, as seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 7.1 – Adding Power Virtual Agents to...