Creating a Power Virtual Agent bot in 10 easy steps!

[chass]

The Power Platform has a new member of the family: Power Virtual Agents!

Power Virtual Agents, provide exceptional support to customers and employees with AI-driven virtual agents. Easily create and maintain bots with a no-code interface.

If you aren’t familiar with bots, a bot is a computer program that utilizes conversational AI, a bot  can conduct text conversations with your customers to direct them to what they need quickly without requiring your human agents to intervene. Bots provide a great way to answer simple, repetitive questions from your customers and to help them do repeatable tasks like find out how to return or exchange an item, join your rewards program, or cancel an order (which you’ll learn how to do in this training). Bots save your agents time (and your company money) by freeing agents to focus on more complex problem-solving and handle more valuable customer interactions.

This blog post is a very introductory walk through on how to get started creating your own bot.

Step 1: Navigate to https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com/en-us/ and select “Try Preview”

Step 2. Log in to the tenant you want to create your bot in.

This presumes you already have an environment created in your Office Tenant. If you don’t already have a Tenant or environment please see the directions can be found in an App an two hours in the Power Apps training: https://aka.ms/powerappstraining

Step 3. Create a new bot.

Being there is no bot in your tenant, you will get automatically get prompted to create one.

Step 4. Set up the bot options

If you don’t want to create your bot in the default environment, you can set this under “More Options”

Step 5. That is, it! Your bot is built, and it is time to test it!!!!!!!!

To do this turn on tracing

Step 6. Add some text that falls into your greeting phrase.

Step 7. Watch the processing and workflow

Step 8. Customize your bot

Now that you have seen your bot in action, let’s customize it!

The easiest place to start is the greeting button.  If you toggle tracing back off you see this option.

Step 9. Change your greeting

Step 10. Verify your Updates!

Simply rerun your bot and greet it, the response should now come back with your new greeting!

Congratulations you have just created your own bot with no code and simple configuration changes.

In the next post we will show you how to deploy it!

For more information check out the forum at https://aka.ms/virtualagentforum

[abhi_r]

Great article! Looks like the link to the Virtual agents forum in the forum is broken. Please update it to this http://aka.ms/PowerVirtualAgentsForum 

[david_castillo]

This is great! Will we be able to pass data from this chatbot to either a SharePoint list or CDS entity?

[david_castillo]

Hey guys,

I saw the pricing in the link. May I ask what we mean by session? Is it when a user interacts with an agent, that's already counted as one session? And does that mean if the user refreshes the screen and goes back to the same screen, that counts as another session?

EDIT: Also, is there a developer environment we can use?

[Malla]

Session is counted based on the full interaction and if you refresh it count as different session. Regarding the development environment please see below.

https://signup.microsoft.com/signup?sku=606b54a9-78d8-4298-ad8b-df6ef4481c80&ru=https%3a%2f%2fpowerv...

[ut0624]

Thanks for the great article!

[njamom14]

Thanks Chass!

[TallOne987]

Thanks for this helpful article.

[rramoscabral]

The URL https://aka.ms/virtualagentforum is outdated, but this https://aka.ms/pva_forum is still working.

[felipetesting]

Thanks a lot for the article. Helped me a lot! 

[samtesting2022]

Thank you, this article helped.