Power Virtual Agents is part of the Microsoft Power Platform and is a useful tool for creating automated chatbots to help guide users on a path.
This course will teach you how to use and build your own chatbots. You will learn how to identify common components like topics, entities, and actions, as well as how to build chatbots that can be started with keywords.
Also, you will learn how to prepare your bots for use on websites, Teams, and other channels. This course will help you in preparing for Microsoft certification.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the different uses for Power Virtual Agents
- Create topics with questions, conditions, messages, and links
- Find and use entities to structure your data
- Test and deploy your bots
- Keep tabs on the analytics of your agents to track usage and performance
Intended Audience
- IT professionals who are interested in obtaining a Microsoft certification
- Those who would like to help customers and teams find the right information quickly through an automated chatbot
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this course. The application to create Power Virtual Agents is free to try and anyone with a Microsoft license can use it.
Let's get an understanding of Power Virtual Agents. Power Virtual Agents comes in two versions, a Web App version, and a Microsoft Teams version. Most of the functionality is the same, but they focus on different environments.
First of all, let's look at the Web App version. You can access this application by going to this address: https://web.powerva.microsoft.com. This will be the most common used version if you're wanting to put chatbots on your websites, in mobile apps, social media, email and others where code can be embedded or added to a custom application built in-house. All editing happens within the Web Application screen.
The Teams version is, as you may have guessed, for use in the Teams environment, even though this is the easiest way to produce chatbots for Teams, you could still take a bot that you created for the website in the Web App version and put it into Teams using the Web App version channels. We will see how both options would work.
Editing in the Teams mode brings your authoring canvas right into Teams. Editing in Teams will seem to work the same as the Web Application, but one big difference is the Teams mode is made for publishing your work to Teams only. Notice that other channels are not available in the Teams mode. Hopefully, this discussion makes it easier to decide the version you should use to deploy your chatbots.
Ron is an experienced professional with in-depth expertise in SharePoint, Power Automate, Power BI, and Microsoft 365. He enjoys involvement in corporate presentations, training, change management, communications, marketing, and facilitation.
Ron brings this experience together to design SharePoint solutions that meet his client’s business, training, and collaboration needs. His skillset includes: Program Management, Change Management, SharePoint Site Administration and Architecture, Project Management, Graphic Design, and Technology Infrastructure Expertise. Ron is an expert skier and speaks Japanese as a second language.