But what truly made this feature release a success? The power of COMMUNITY!

We love working with our global community members who bring best practices, technical skills and opportunities to shine, share and celebrate Power Virtual Agents.

Keep reading to see all of the fantastic resources that the Power Platform community members have created.

Kevin Stratvert: Power Virtual Agents Chatbot Tutorial

In this step-by-step tutorial, Kevin shows how you can build your own intelligent chatbots using the new Power Virtual Agents unified authoring canvas.

Follow Kevin Stratvert on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, website.

Rishona Elijah (MVP) gives a tour PVA unified authoring canvas

In this article, Rishona gives an overview of changes and new features:

• Use Power Fx to handle additional logic
• Create adaptive cards from the PVA interface
• Add multiple message variations
• Easily insert images & videos

Article: Power Virtual Agents unified canvas: overview of changes and new features.

Follow Rishona Elijah on Twitter, LinkedIn, website, Microsoft MVP profile.

Dian Taylor (MVP) advanced authoring canvas preview

Dian’s article and video gives the new unified authoring canvas a deep-dive on setting variable nodes, using Power Fx formulas, handling list variables, and how to dynamically retrieve and use values from Dataverse and Dynamics 365 in her chatbot.

Article: Power Virtual Agents: advanced authoring canvas preview.

Follow Dian Taylor on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, website, Microsoft MVP profile.

Ben den Blanken blogs about adding vertical buttons with the new canvas

Ben shows you how to add Vertical Buttons to a Power Virtual Agents question by using the new advanced authoring canvas to do so. This used to require Bot Framework Composer, but not anymore!

Article: Adding Vertical Buttons to Power Virtual Agents – Revisited.

Follow Ben den Blanken on Twitter, LinkedIn, website.

Daniel Christian (MVP) gives an overview of the new PVA features

In this video, Daniel demonstrates some of the new unified authoring features, with a look at the overall new design changes, the enhancements in the messages and controls focusing on the basic and adaptive cards, the Power Fx functions available and the new topic management capabilities.

Follow Daniel Christian on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Microsoft MVP profile.

Joe Gill (MVP) explains how to use Power Fx in the latest version of Power Virtual Agents

In Joe’s article, it includes how to use Power Fx in the authoring canvas and how it greatly enhances the ability to add capabilities like data validation and manipulation directly in your bot rather than relying on Power Automate.

Article: Power Fx -Power Virtual Agents.

Follow Joe Gill on Twitter, LinkedIn, website, Microsoft MVP profile.

Kent Weare (Microsoft) checks out the new PVA unified experience

In this video, Kent checks out the new PVA unified experience that includes support for Adaptive Cards, Setting Variables, message variation and much more.

Follow Kent Weare on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, website.

Gary Pretty (Microsoft) showcases the new PVA on Power CAT Live

In this discussion between Gary Pretty and Phil Topness, Gary shows what’s new and what’s coming to give you more control over your bots and include the power of Bot Framework Composer in Power Virtual Agents. Power Fx is now integrated across the Power Virtual Agents canvas and gives you more power than ever.

Follow Gary Pretty on Twitter, LinkedIn, website.

Power Virtual Agents featured at the Power Platform French Summit

Power Virtual Agents also got a lot of coverage at the Power Platform French Summit with customer testimonials and deep-dives and demos of the new unified authoring canvas.

More no-code/low-code power in the new version of PVA (in French)

Follow Henry Jammes on Twitter, LinkedIn.

PVA used for employee gamification at Bolloré Transport & Logistics (in French)

Follow Clément Aumeunier on LinkedIn.

Follow Laurent Joseph on Twitter, LinkedIn.

Follow Cheick Diallo on LinkedIn.

Use virtual agents to optimize employee and customer service (in French)

Follow Henry Jammes on Twitter, LinkedIn.

PVA as one of the use cases to integrate the Power Platform with SAP (in French)

Follow Rémi Chambard on LinkedIn.

Follow Raphaël Botzon on LinkedIn.

Want to be part of the Power Virtual Agents community? check out the forum to connect with peers, share ideas, and learn from experts

The post Power Virtual Agents + Community = Best practices for the new advanced authoring canvas appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Hear from Gary Pretty and Phil Topness on the new capabilities now available within the Power Virtual Agents studio.

Here are some of the things that are new in the Preview:

Unified bot building for Microsoft

Professional developers and subject matter experts can easily collaborate within the same studio to build powerful conversational bots together. Developers are already familiar with the sophisticated functionality of Bot Framework Composer and subject matter experts and fusion teams have long used Power Virtual Agents to easily create and manage their bots end to end. Those capabilities are now unified within a single, powerful building experience – making Power Virtual Agents the single bot building tool for professional developers and subject matter experts alike.

Showcasing the new Power Virtual Agents canvas re-designed from the ground up

Advanced authoring

Rich and powerful authoring capabilities, including developer-focused features for complex dialog management to low-code experiences. Some highlights:

• Support for interactive adaptive cards and multi-media responses (images, videos, quick replies) help make conversations richer
• It is now incredibly easy to store, transform, reuse, and work with data that a bot gathers through the conversation – a common need for professional developers. Using the integrated Power Fx editor, builders can connect to a backend custom API using Microsoft Power Platform connectors, receive a response, parse it, extract the necessary information, and easily transform the information using Power Fx for use within the conversation. For example, asking a user for their employee ID, connecting to a backend payroll system that returns a blob, cracking it open and extracting salary information, and presenting it to the user is now all possible within the graphical experience.
• Advanced flexibility for common conversation behavior, such as fine control over how your bot disambiguates a user intent or handles fallback and escalation scenarios. Bot builders now have control over dialog behavior, including custom validation rules, the number of times to re-prompt following an invalid answer, and what the bot should do if your users get stuck.
• Enabling your bot to react to event, such as when a spot opens up or a package arrive, with event extensibility and contextual triggers (coming soon).

Fusion teams and collaboration

Throughout the industry, bots are increasingly being built and managed in-house by multidisciplinary teams of subject matter experts, developers, and IT power users. Power Virtual Agents is an ideal conversational AI studio for teams working together to build bots and conversational experiences because users can easily collaborate within the graphical canvas, with multi-authoring support and powerful, Office like collaboration and commenting capabilities.

Governance, management, and compliance

Power Virtual Agents provides bot builders access to the host of powerful admin, governance and self-management capabilities that Power Platform offers: lifecycle management, a unified admin center, and configurable data loss prevention policies to control bots and data. Additionally, Power Virtual Agents comes with numerous compliance and regulatory certifications that users commonly need:

• For government users, Power Virtual Agents is Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certified. Learn more
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) certified for healthcare scenarios
• For payment scenarios, Power Virtual Agents is PCI compliant to handle payments.
• Other compliance offerings include System and Organization Controls (SOC), multiple International Organization Standards (ISO), and many more.

Full compliance offerings available here.

Configurable data loss prevention policies in the Power Platform Admin Center

You can also read about all the new features in detail here

Getting started

1. Go to aka.ms/tryPVA and login in to your existing Power Virtual Agents account or sign up for a free trial (or even explore the click-through demo)
2. After you land in the product, click the ‘Create’ tab in the left navigation menu.
3. Click the option to ‘Try the unified canvas (preview)’ to create a bot with the new capabilities.
   

   Power Virtual Agents’ new unified canvas button

4. Select ‘Continue’ to continue with creating a new preview bot. Once ready, you can begin exploring the new capabilities.

Limited time offer

Power Virtual Agents and additional chat sessions are available at a limited-time price of $200 (base) and $100 (add-ons) respectively.

This is the equivalent of 10c per virtual agent session (100 turns of conversation, or about 0.1c cents per turn), including full Power Virtual Agents features and connected Power Automate cloud flows with 1000+ prebuilt connectors.

You can purchase directly via the website or speak with your Microsoft or licensing solution provider.

Beginning your journey

As always, these new capabilities continue to be available in Power Virtual Agents’ globally-distributed, multi-tenant SaaS, backed by the full power of Power Platform and the Microsoft cloud.

There’s no infrastructure to manage, no services to stand up, no complex AI models to train — just sign up, work together with your subject matter experts and developers to build your bot within the graphical studio, connect it to your backend systems with hundreds of pre-built connectors and the built-in capabilities of Power Automate – and start talking with your users in Microsoft Teams, websites, Facebook, or the channel of your choice. You can even access built-in analytics on how your bot is performing and insights on what to build next—all from within the same pane of glass.

The launch of our new unified authoring canvas is another step along our continuing journey to democratize conversational AI. With the continuing integration of Bot Framework capabilities and Azure Cognitive Services into Power Virtual Agents, bot creators of all stripes – from subject matter experts to developers – have a single, unified conversational AI studio from Microsoft for all their bot-building needs.

Happy Bot Building!

Omar Aftab
Vice President, Conversational AI

Got questions?

Check out the community page to ask, share and collaborate on the solutions you’re building. 

The post Power Virtual Agents’ new advanced authoring canvas appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

I’m thrilled to announce the long-anticipated Topic overlap detection and Topic suggestions from chat transcripts AI features that are now available in public preview.

To use the features, simply go to Manage > AI capabilities, and turn these two features on.

Watch the below video to understand more on how to use the AI-assisted bot authoring features to optimize your chatbot.

Note: These features are currently in public preview, only available in English language PVA bots. 

The post AI-assisted authoring: detect topic overlaps and get topic suggestions from bot sessions appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Video 1.  New Microsoft Mechanics Video showcasing updates to Power Virtual Agents

 
Power Virtual Agents’ New Enhancements

One of the most exciting enhancements to Power Virtual Agents is the new seamless integration with Microsoft Dataverse for Teams which provides a subset of the full Microsoft Dataverse.  Millions of professionals use Microsoft Teams for collaboration, and with the addition of Power Virtual Agents to Teams, these users can create sophisticated chatbots for a nearly unlimited number of scenarios.  One of the best attributes of Power Virtual Agents is the user-friendly maker canvas and we’re excited to offer this amazing canvas experience as part of the integrated Teams experience.  Also, the chatbot maker experience remains easy and even those with non-technical backgrounds can create a chatbot in minutes. A chatbot can be scoped for a specific Team or even shared across the entire organization.  With this powerful integration, users can quickly build customized chatbots for example an HR chatbot for frequently asked HR questions, to an IT service desk chatbot to handle basic IT questions.   In our new Mechanics video, we demonstrate how quickly and easily a functional HR chatbot which provides information on an employee’s vacation balance can be created inside the Teams environment (figure 1).  Importantly, this new avenue of creation abides by the strict security and governance standards offered with all Microsoft services. Dataverse for Teams leverages the data governance paradigms of Microsoft Power Platform and enables access control in the Teams Admin Center. The Power Platform admin center provides more detail, including monitoring dedicated capacity utilization and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies.

Figure 1. Power Virtual Agents chatbot created inside Microsoft Teams with the new Dataverse for Teams

The Mechanics video also demonstrates the new Power Virtual Agents’ native integration with Bot Framework Composer (figure 2).  This integration with Power Virtual Agents makes it even easier for professional developers to collaborate with citizen developer counterparts, which helps ensure that your organization creates the most effective chatbots for any scenario.  Bot Framework Composer is an open-source visual authoring canvas for pro-developers build chatbots.  Composer integrates language understanding services such as LUIS and QnA Maker and allows sophisticated composition of bot replies using Language Generation.  Power Virtual Agents with Bot Framework Composer enables you to create chatbots that offer adaptive conversations where a chatbot can seamlessly pivot between topics based on the context of the dialogue making the conversation more intelligent and more realistic.  Learn more about extending your chatbot with Bot Framework Composer.

Both these new advances further strengthen the capabilities offered with Power Virtual Agents and expand the flexibility offered to developers of all skill levels.  By enabling easier collaboration between end users who are closest to business challenges with the technical expertise of professional developers, Power Virtual Agents enables organizations to create the most adaptable and relevant chatbots required for business success.

Figure 2. Native integration of Bot Framework Composer with Power Virtual Agents

Begin Your Journey with Power Virtual Agents

We hope you explore the possibilities with Power Virtual Agents by starting a trial today.  You can build your first chatbot in a matter of minutes and get started on delivering an engaging experience for your customers and employees.  Also, make sure to follow our blog for the latest feature updates and use cases for chatbots.  Please join our community to share your ideas, provide your comments, and even help drive the future direction of our product development.  Below are some quick links to get started on your journey!

• Power Virtual Agents Webpage
• Power Virtual Agent Technical Docs
• Power Virtual Agents Video Gallery
• Power Virtual Agents Blog

Also, check out these other great Microsoft Mechanics videos featuring the Power Platform:

• How to use the Microsoft Power Platform | Getting Started
• Inside the Microsoft Power Platform | Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and more
• Power BI & Azure – Self-Service Report Creation | Humana’s Practical Use Case
• Power Platform Admin Center | Unified IT Management Experience
• Power Apps | New Capabilities Building Zero-To-Low-Code Apps
• Power BI – AI and Q&A updates, decomposition tree, and data prep
• Robotic Process Automation with Microsoft Power Automate, UI flows and AI Builder
• How to Build (automated, no code) Chatbots with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents
• Build Power Apps in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2020
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Step-by-Step Setup for Microsoft Power Automate Desktop 

The post Power Virtual Agents enhancements showcased in new Microsoft Mechanics video appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Power Virtual Agents now allows you to share your bot with your teammates, allowing multiple contributors to edit and manage your bot.  Subject matter experts in a team can collaborate together on a bot.  For example, a customer support bot can now have different subject matter experts working on refund related topics vs. topics related to membership.

What this short video for an overview and read on for details about sharing and collaborating on a bot.

Share a bot

To share a bot, select the Share button at the top of the bot’s Home page.

Specify the name or email address of the users that you would like to share the bot with.

Review and set the users’ permissions, and then select Share to share the bot with new users. Everyone you share the bot with can view, edit, configure, share and publish the bot, but they cannot delete it.

You can send an email invitation to new users by checking the check box Send an email invitation to new users.

Click Share and the bot is now shared with the selected users. They will receive an invitation email with a link to the bot and can log into Power Virtual Agents to access it.

Collaborate on a bot

When multiple users are logged into the bot, the topic list page shows new information to support a multi-user experience. You can see who last modified the bot and when. You can also see who is currently editing the bot – making for a truly collaborative experience on authoring bot content.

When multiple users are working in the same topic, the bot warns against any accidental overrides.

You can find more information on sharing a bot, assigning environment security roles, collaborating on a bot, and how to stop sharing a bot in our documentation.

Visit us in our community forum to share your questions and start a discussion on bot sharing.

The post Share and collaborate on your bot with subject matter experts appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

Join this webinar to learn about these new features from the product team. In this session, we will review what’s been released lately, including the new collaboration features like exporting and importing a bot, and the ability for multiple authors to collaborate on a bot.  We’ll look at new authoring features that enable passing in context to the bot from an external website, new Power Automate integration features, and finally, enabling your bot in multiple languages to expand your customer reach.

Start leveraging the latest that Power Virtual Agents has to offer you!

When:  July 29, 10 AM PST

Register at https://learning.eventbuilder.com/FY21WhatsNewWebinarSeries (leave the Partner ID field blank if you don’t have one) to get a link to the Live Event.

Don’t miss the opportunity to attend the What’s New Release Webinar Series, focused on What’s new in Power Virtual Agents.

The post Webinar: Power Virtual Agents – What’s new appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

The post Webinar: Use Bot Framework Skills to extend the abilities of your Power Virtual Agents bot with Azure Bot Framework 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.

Today we are excited to announce the availability of both. In this blog post, we will show you how to start using them.

Bot variables

First, let’s introduce a new type of variable available in Power Virtual Agents. Commonly known as global variables, in Power Virtual Agents they are referred to as bot variables, as they apply across the entire bot.

Bot variables are useful to store information that does not change from topic to topic, like the user’s name, or their address. This way the bot doesn’t need to ask the same question more than once.

Here is a quick look at how you can change the type of an existing variable to a bot variable:

1. Create a variable in a topic
2. Click on the “Edit” button on the variable to open the new “Variable Properties” pane
3. In the page, select the “Bot” option under the “Usage” section

Setting bot variable values from external sources

You can also set the value of this variable from external sources. This lets the bot start the conversation with some context acquired before it starts to chat with the user, and skip a question to which it already knows the answer. For example, you can bring the web page URL or Product name the user was looking at before launching the bot and tailor the greeting message.

Here is a view on how to set the value of a variable from external sources

1. Create a bot variable as shown above
2. Select the “External sources can set values” option under the “Usage” section
3. On the canvas which the bot is launched from, append the variable name as a parameter, and the value for the variable as shown in the example below:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <body>
        <iframe 
            src="https://powerva.microsoft.com/webchat/bots/<botId>?ProductName=Surface%20Book"
            frameborder="0"
            style="width: 100%; height: 100%;">
        </iframe>
    </body>
</html>

This will set the value of “ProductName” variable as “Surface Book”, and skip the question. This makes the bot smarter, and contextually aware of your customers interaction before they talk to the bot.

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 Reusing variables across topics, and setting variable values from external sources appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.

• Democratizing Conversational AI – Empowering your subject matter experts to easily create powerful chatbots using a guided, no-code graphical interface. There is no need for developers or data scientists.
• Engaging Naturally – Engage with customers and employees conversationally. Resolve routine issues easily, freeing staff to focus on more complex matters.
• Taking Action – Easily connect your backend systems with a few clicks using the hundreds of connectors that come with Power Platform – or call APIs and custom workflows using Microsoft Power Automate.
• Continually Enhancing – Leverage our AI on your website to automatically build chat topics and get started in a few clicks. Access powerful metrics and insights from your chatbot’s usage to help determine which topics to build next.

Learn the fundamentals of Power Virtual Agents

Check out how easy it is to build a chatbot with our new Mechanics Demo Bench for Power Virtual Agents. You’ll see one of our product leads, Emma Archer demonstrate many of its core functions and ease of use.

Begin Your Journey with Power Virtual Agents

With this robust set of capabilities out-of-the-box, Power Virtual Agents has provided unique chatbot solutions for many customers in the months since our launch. For example, TruGreen envisions using Power Virtual Agents to enhance the end-to-end customer experience. Also, more recently, Coca-Cola announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft which includes Power Virtual Agents as part of the broader initiative. Many other customers are in the process of completing POCs and beginning their Power Virtual Agents deployments as we continue to expand our capabilities and our customers continue to leverage the service for amazing chatbot experiences.

We hope you will explore the possibilities with Power Virtual Agents by starting a trial today. You can build your first chatbot in a matter of minutes and get started on delivering an engaging experience for your customers and employees.  Also, make sure to follow our blog for the latest feature updates and use cases for chatbots. Please join our community to share your ideas, provide your comments, and even help drive the future direction of our product development.

Below are some quick links to get started on your journey!

• Power Virtual Agents Webpage
• Power Virtual Agent Technical Docs
• Power Virtual Agents Video Gallery
• Power Virtual Agents Blog

The post How to Use Conversational AI to Enhance Engagement appeared first on Microsoft Copilot Blog.