To start the configuration of Power Virtual Agents, first of all, it is required to sign in at https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com/. This will open the home page of the virtual agent configuration.
The home page left side contains menu options, the middle part is catering user interface to test our designed chatbot and the right area contains all the admin utilities like creating topics, creating entities, publish, deployment of the bot etc.
Steps to create ChatBot
1- Sign in at https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com/ and click on create “New Bot” icon
2- Enter the chatbot name in the dialog and press the create button. This can take up to 15 minutes for the first bot you create in an environment
3- During the creation process, you'll see a notification at the top of the Power Virtual Agents portal indicating that the bot is still being assembled.
Steps to edit/create Topics
1-Go to the Topics tab.
2- Select the Greeting topics and open the authoring canvas to change the default text that comes with default on new chatbot creation.
3- Change the default welcome message according to academy's requirements.
4- Next step is to create custom topics
Power Apps: This topic is used to traverse to the students on the selection of the power app option. Down the line, this redirects to canvas app, model-driven apps, and power portal apps subtopics.
Power BI: This topic is used to share generic details the power BI, and if students are interested to get study material on their email id, then it takes their name & email address as input and forwards the requisite details over an email to them.
All the topics below are configured in the same manner as power BI option, if students are interested in specific application type, PVA takes input as their name and email id and forward the relevant study material to their emails.
Power Virtual Agents
Power Automate
Canvas App
Model-Driven App
Power Portal App
Power Automate Integration
In this entire journey, the power automates are used to send the study material via an email to students.
Students input names and email ids are passed to power automate from virtual agents to send the study contents.
Steps:
1- To integrate the power automate requires to call an action from virtual agents.
2-To create a new flow, select the option “Create a flow”. This will open a flow designer interface.
3- In the designer interface, the details like name & email id gathered from students need to be passed as input form PVA.
4- The next step is to configure the “Send an email notification (V3)” email connector. In the “To” field, the email id will be set and the rest “Email Body” would contain the application-specific content and weblinks.
5- In the first line of the email, the student's name will be appended along with email starting text.
6- The last component i.e. “Return values (s) to Power Virtual Agents” is used to send back any output messages, values to PVA.
7- In the below snapshot shown how to pass the student's name and email id to flow job and received output values by the variable in PVA.
Transferring control from one topic to another
This is another important workflow to transfer the control from one topic to another so that students can navigate to downstream, like from Greeting > power apps > canvas app. Transferring between topics achieved by on click of node and select to other topics to the respective options.
End the Conversation
The best way to end the conversation with the chatbot to go another topics and select “End the Conversation with the survey”. This way you can gather the customer experience while interacting with your chatbot.
Snapshot of working PVA
Happy Learning