By using conversations as an interface, chatbots allow you to engage more deeply with your users, automatically handle routine tasks, and answer questions at scale with 24×7 coverage, freeing up time for your employees to dedicate their time to focus on other tasks.

We know that technology is only part of a holistic solution and we are proud to assist organizations working on addressing the challenges introduced by COVID-19 with their critical mission where we can. Here are a few examples of the amazing value that’s being built on top our platform.

Government of India

Part of the Digital India initiative, MyGov is a citizen-centric platform set up to enable people to connect with the Government.

The Government of India in partnership with Accenture India and Microsoft built a COVID-19 Health Assistant to help offload some of the surge in requests and questions the Government is getting from the public related to COVID-19. The chatbot, named Saathi, is built on Power Virtual Agents and supports a wide variety of topics to assist the public in India with information about both national and regional news, services and guidelines.

You can see the Saathi chatbot here: https://self4society.mygov.in/

City of Kobe, Japan

City of Kobe has a population of 1.57 million. As COVID-19 spread across Japan, the city was facing time-sensitive and critical challenges. City officials of Kobe were urgently searching for solutions that could help respond to the high volume of enquiries and provide citizens with a more efficient interface for accessing information related to COVID-19 and about cases in the city.

City of Kobe decided to leverage the Power Platform to help address the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 self checker chatbot is built on Power Virtual Agents and handles requests and questions from citizens about COVID-19.

Tsuyoshi Ito is a city officer in Kobe whose primary role is to identify IT governance and strategy for the city. He started learning about the Power Platform and quickly built the Power Virtual Agents chatbot.

“I could develop all these solutions within weeks because Power Platform makes it so easy and intuitive to do so.” – Tsuyoshi Ito

City of Kobe is one of the early adopters of the expanded language support in Power Virtual Agents and has already built a Japanese version of their COVID-19 self checker chatbot. You can see it here:

https://www.city.kobe.lg.jp/kenko/health/infection/kobe_bot/index.html

Swansea Council Domestic Abuse Hub

Swansea Council’s Domestic Abuse Hub is tasked with providing safety advice and emotional support to those who need it throughout the coronavirus crisis.

“At a time when people are being encouraged to stay in their homes in order to keep safe, it is more important than ever to recognise that not every home is a safe place.” – Megan Stevens, Swansea Council

With a noticeable increase in cases of domestic abuse during the lockdown, Swansea Council decided to build a chatbot on Power Virtual Agents as a new way to connect with people at risk. The chatbot is part of a solution to address domestic abuse by providing easy access to safety advice, contextual information, and signposting to local and national support services.

You can see the domestic abuse chatbot You Are Not Alone here:

https://www.swansea.gov.uk/YouAreNotAlone

More to come…

Check back in here again soon. We’ll update this post with more stories about our partners and customers working on integrating technology solutions to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

The post COVID-19 Customer Stories appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Power Virtual Agents is gaining traction around the world and the market has responded with a strong desire for us to support more languages.

Today we’re excited to announce that we are bringing to public preview support for an extended set of languages! This enables our partners and customers to build even more engaging and locally relevant experiences for their users.

These are the language available in Power Virtual Agents as of today:

• English (already in GA)
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Danish
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Norwegian
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Hindi
• Korean
• Polish

When you create a new bot, you select the language you want the bot to understand when interacting with your users. You’ll see that your new bot is prepopulated with content in the target language and you can easily create more topics with trigger phrases and bot responses in the language you’ve selected.

We’ve already enabled customers to deploy Power Virtual Agents in data centers in a range of geographical regions and added support for locally relevant formats so that the bot knows, for example, when the date 2/3 means March 2nd and when it means February 3rd.

See more details about language support in Power Virtual Agents here.

We’re always listening to your feedback, so please visit our community forum at https://aka.ms/PowerVirtualAgentsForum and share your thoughts with us.

You can also submit your idea requests at https://aka.ms/PowerVirtualAgentsIdeas.

The post Power Virtual Agents is now available in more languages appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Last month, we shared step-by-step guidelines and best practices for creating a Crisis response FAQ bot with Power Virtual Agents to easily help you address common questions from your audience. Identifying the most pertinent topics to support, designing the interactions between user and chatbot for optimal user experience, and publishing the chatbot were among some of the areas covered on the blog.

This blog will focus on how you can use Power Virtual Agents to create a Crisis FAQ bot, which integrates the guidelines from the previous blog and then combines the no-code bot authoring experience with some slightly more advanced features to connect to live data sets for up-to-date information. Try out the chatbot for yourself below.

In the chat window, try typing e.g. “Why is it called coronavirus?” or “How many active cases are there?”

COVID-19 Assistant

Powered by Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

Behind the scenes – Taking a look inside the bot

To quickly build out the knowledge base of the bot, we’re using the Topic Suggestion feature pointing to available online resources from reputable sources like the CDC, the WHO, and Johns Hopkins to extract dialog content so that the bot can answer questions about e.g. what the coronavirus is or what the common symptoms are.

We’ve also added support for the chatbot to access live data about the number of COVID-19 cases. We do this by leveraging a flow from Power Automate to match the user’s location input to lat/long coordinates which in turn are submitted to a Bot Framework skill that queries data from the Bing COVID-19 Tracker at bing.com/covid. The tracker integrates data sources from around the world. We then aggregate that data and add latitude and longitude information. We announced recently that we are now making this dataset available to researchers and those in academia at bing.com/covid/dev or GitHub.

In the screenshot of the Power Virtual Agents bot authoring canvas above, we can see how the bot author is testing the execution of the flow to make sure that it returns the expected value for ‘Denmark’ from bing.com/covid.

Scale up and streamline information

We know that many organizations are struggling with keeping up with increased demand for critical services while adapting to a complex new work environment. If your organization needs to scale up and streamline information with your key audience, we hope this demonstration is a useful illustration of how advanced features in Power Virtual Agents can quickly connect to live data sets for up-to-date information.

The no-code bot authoring experience available within Power Virtual Agents empowers content owners to build and deploy their own bots independently and can serve as an enabling tool for your organization as you maintain focus on addressing new challenges. Begin creating your Crisis Response FAQ Bot today using our guidelines and stay tuned for examples we will share in the coming days of customers who have been relying on Power Virtual Agents to respond rapidly to audience needs at scale.

(Editors Note: If you want to see a video of this being created please see: https://aka.ms/PVACrisisWebinar )

DISCLAIMER
SAMPLE ONLY
Any chatbot, chatbot topic, and/or guidance on chatbot creation that Microsoft provides herein is a sample only and may be used for dissemination of reference information only. The sample (1) is not intended or made available as a medical device for the diagnosis of disease or other conditions, or in the cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of disease, or otherwise to be used as a component of any clinical offering or product, and no license or right is granted to use the sample for such purposes, (2) is not designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment and should not be used as a substitute for, or to replace, professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment, and (3) should not be used for emergencies and does not support emergency calls. You are solely responsible for your use of the sample (including incorporation of it into any product or service intended for medical or clinical use) and for explicitly providing end users with appropriate warnings and disclaimers pertaining to your use of the sample. You are solely responsible for any personal injury or death that may occur as a result of your use of the sample, including (without limitation) any such injuries to end users.

The post Helping organizations provide real time information about COVID-19 with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

With the AI-assisted authoring capabilities in Power Virtual Agents, it’s easy to leverage your existing web content and integrate it into your bot experience.

Check out this brief video which walks you through the simple steps:

We’d love to hear about your experience with this feature! Please visit our community forum at https://aka.ms/PowerVirtualAgentsForum and share your feedback.

If you have any idea requests, please submit them at https://aka.ms/PowerVirtualAgentsIdeas.

Thanks!

The post Automatically generate bot content from FAQ pages appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.