Have you ever wished you could create your own chatbot that can answer questions, provide information and perform tasks for your customers or employees? Do you want to save time and money by automating common business processes and reducing support requests? If so, you might be interested in Power Virtual Agents, a powerful tool that lets you build intelligent chatbots and virtual agents without any coding or AI expertise.
Power Virtual Agents is part of the Microsoft Power Platform Suite, which enables anyone to create apps, workflows, reports, and chatbots using low-code or no-code solutions. Power Virtual Agents is available as both a standalone web app and as a discrete app within Microsoft Teams, which means you can easily create and deploy your own chatbots within your organization or across channels like websites, mobile apps, social media platforms, and more.
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With Power Virtual Agents, you can:
- Build conversational interfaces that use natural language understanding to interact with users in a friendly and human-like way.
- Use data stored in Microsoft Dataverse for Teams or many other sources using the supplied standard connectors to provide personalized and relevant responses.
- Automate business processes using Power Automate while integrating with data sources via hundreds of pre-built Microsoft Power Platform connectors.
- Monitor and improve your chatbot performance using analytics and feedback tools.
- Collaborate with other bot authors using features like multi-authoring, Office-like commenting, version control, and more.
Power Virtual Agents have proven to drive business transformation for many customers who have built intelligent chatbots to automate business processes, reduce development costs, and drive efficiencies. According to a commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study by Forrester Consulting, customers who used Power Virtual Agents achieved:
- 261% ROI over three years
- 50% less time required to handle customer support requests
- 80% reduction in bot development costs
- 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores
If you are interested in test driving out Power Virtual Agents for yourself, you have two options:
- If you are already using Microsoft Teams, you can start building chatbots for free within the app. You can create up to 10 bots per tenant with up to one million messages per month across all bots.
- If you want more flexibility and functionality for your chatbots, you can sign up for a free trial of the standalone web app. You can create unlimited bots with up to two GB of storage per bot. After the trial period ends (30 days), you will need to purchase a license for each bot at $1K USD per month per bot.
How is Power Virtual Agent Evolving
Chatbots are becoming more popular and useful for businesses of all sizes and industries. They can provide quick and personalized answers to customer queries, reduce operational costs and improve customer satisfaction. However, creating and maintaining a chatbot can be challenging, especially when covering a wide range of topics and scenarios.
I am very excited about a new feature for Power Virtual Agents called Conversation Booster. This feature allows you to leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance your chatbot conversations without any coding or complex configuration.
What is Conversation Booster?
Conversation Booster is a feature of Power Virtual Agents that uses AI to help automate and accelerate your customer conversations. It enables your chatbot to connect to various data sources, such as internal and external websites, databases, or knowledge bases, and generate answers to user questions on the fly.
For example, if your chatbot is for an online store, you can use Conversation Booster to connect it to your product catalog website. Then, when a user asks about a product’s price, availability, or features, your chatbot can automatically fetch the relevant information from the website and provide an accurate answer.
How Does Conversation Booster Work?
Conversation Booster works by using GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), a large language model developed by OpenAI that can generate natural language texts based on given inputs. GPT-3 is integrated into Power Apps and AI Builder, which are Microsoft’s low-code platforms for building apps and AI solutions.
To use Conversation Booster, you need to create a preview chatbot in Power Virtual Agents. Then, you need to configure the data sources that you want your chatbot to access. You can choose from predefined connectors such as Bing Search, SharePoint Online or create custom connectors using API Management.
Once you have set up the data sources, you can enable Conversation Booster for your chatbot topics. A topic is a specific conversation scenario that your chatbot can handle. For example, you can have a topic for greeting users, another for processing orders, etc.
When you enable Conversation Booster for a topic, you can specify which data source(s) you want your chatbot to use for that topic. You can also define some keywords or phrases that will trigger the AI-based boosted conversation mode.
Finally, with the new Microsoft Power Virtual Agent copilot, creating a chatbot will even get easier and more powerful.
Chatbots are becoming very popular and more powerful. Power Virtual Agents is an easy-to-use yet powerful tool that can help you create intelligent chatbots that can transform your business. Whether you want to improve customer service, streamline workflows, increase productivity, or simply have some fun creating conversational interfaces, Power Virtual Agents has something for everyone.
Contact Us
If you are considering using chatbots in your enterprise, get in touch with our Digital and Technology Transformation Team to learn more and optimize the experience for your employees and customers!
