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

Understanding Power Virtual Agents and the Power Platform

As mentioned previously, at the time of writing, Power Virtual Agents is the newest member of the Power Platform family of products. Our first scenario looks at the functionality available with the Power Platform. As such, licensing aligns with the general Power Platform model, as you can see in the specific guide. The guide covers all modules of the Power Platform, and you should focus your attention on the Power Virtual Agents section for this topic.

As a new member of the Power Platform family, you will notice that the licensing of Power Virtual Agents is slightly decoupled from the other Power Platform services. As of December 31, 2020, Microsoft has revamped the generic Power Platform licensing, dropping certain older plans in favor of newer packaged services. This is part of an ongoing process where Microsoft is taking feedback from the community at large, along with usage statistics and other influential factors....