Create a Chatbot Using Power Virtual Agent

Ayavin Solutions

March 13, 2023

Introduction

With the help of Power Virtual Agent we can create powerful AI-powered chatbots for a range of requests—from providing simple answers to common questions to resolving issues requiring complex conversations. Engage with customers and employees in multiple languages across websites, mobile apps, Facebook, Microsoft Teams, or any channel supported by the Azure Bot Framework. These bots can be created easily without the need for data scientists or developers. 

Explore the home page 

Power Virtual Agents has an app-level home page that isn't specific to any bot. On this page you can create a new bot, view recent bots, and access learning resources like videos, documentation, and learning paths. 

In the navigation menu, select Chatbots to open the Chatbots page and view all the bots you have access to in this environment.

 

How To Create a Chatbot: 

 

• Go to the Power Virtual Agents introduction website.  Supported browsers include Microsoft Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. 
• On the website, select Start free, and then sign in with your work email address. Note that personal Microsoft accounts are currently not supported. 
• When you first sign up, a default Power Apps environment is made for you. For most users, this is sufficient. However, if you want to specify a custom Power Apps environment, select a different environment from the environment picker.  

• In the navigation menu, select Create. You can also select Home then select Create a bot. 
• Choose one of the following options:  

• Use Build for production to create production bots that are intended to be deployed to your customers.  
• Use Try the unified canvas (preview) to test out the new authoring features in preview. These preview bots are supported in English only and aren't recommended for deploying for customer use.  

 

Create a bot- 

 

• For Name your bot, enter a name for your bot. This can be something generic to your company or specific to the scenario you are tailoring your bot to. 
• For What language will your bot speak, select the language you want your bot to speak. 

• Select Create, The process of creating your first bot in a new environment can take up to 15 minutes; subsequent bots will be created much faster. 
• After a few minutes, you'll be redirected to the bot's overview page. You'll see a banner at the top of the Power Virtual Agents portal indicating that the bot is still being built. While your bot is building, you can't save any edits during this time, but you can: 

• Explore the overall user interface 
• Look at topics 
• Experiment with the preloaded user topics and system topics 
• Interact with your bot using the Test Canvas 

• When the bot creation process completes, the banner changes. You now have full functionality in the bot and can modify any User or System topic, test out your content changes, or deploy your bot. 

 

Create a topic 

 

Now that you have full functionality within your bot, you can create your own topic, which is a dialog tree that describes how your bot responds to a user's question. 

 

• In the navigation menu, select Topics, then select New topic at the top of the page.  
• Name your topic and include some trigger phrases for this topic. Trigger phrases are examples of the type of user questions or utterances that help teach the bot when to respond with this dialog. 

 

How to add Your Chatbot to Custom Website: 

 

You can add your bot to a live website as an IFrame. Your live website can be a customer-facing external website or an internal site, like a SharePoint site. 

You can also add the bot to your Power Platform admin centre. 

 

Add bot to your website 

 

• In the navigation menu under Settings, select Channels. 
• Select Custom website and then select Copy to copy it directly to the clipboard, or share to email to open a new email message with the snippet included, in your default email app. 
• Provide the snippet to your web developer to add the bot to your website. 

 

Add chatbot to a page of power Apps Portal. 

 

Once you have a chatbot created, you can add this component to a portals page with the following steps: 

 

• Go to Power Apps. 
• Select Apps from the left pane. 
• Select your portal. 
• Select Edit to open the portals Studio. 
• Select Components from the left pane. 
• Select Chatbot component. 
• Select your bot. 
• Select whether the bot appears on all pages in your portal, or on specific pages. 
• If you select Specific pages, use Manage bots in pages to control the pages that can use this bot. 

You can add more bots from your environment across different pages in a portal. For example, a bot that answers questions related to the workplace can be added to an HR page. Or a bot that answers basic payroll queries can be added to a Finance page. However, you can't have one page use more than one bot. 

 

Add a chatbot to Microsoft Teams- 

 

Now that you have published your bot, you can make your bot available to users in Microsoft Teams so you, your teammates, and the broader organization can interact with it. You need to publish the bot at least once before users can interact with the bot in Microsoft Teams. 

You can: 

• Customize your bot's appearance in Microsoft Teams 
• Install the bot for yourself in Microsoft Teams 
• Share the bot's installation link with other users 
• Show the bot in Microsoft Teams app store. 
• Show the bot to shared users by adding it to the Microsoft Teams app store Built by your colleague’s section. 
• Share the bot with the organization by submitting the bot for admin approval to be featured in the Microsoft Teams app store Built by your org section. 
• Add the bot to a team channel. 
• Download the pre-generated Teams app manifest to distribute it within your Microsoft Teams tenant.