Build A FAQ Chatbot With Power Virtual Agents

Introduction

Power Virtual Agents is an easy to create, powerful bot with a no-code graphical interface. This means there isn't necessarily a need for data scientists or developers. It eliminates the gap between the subject matter experts and the development teams building the bots and it minimizes the IT effort required to deploy and maintain a custom conversational solution.

Every business has their own website with a FAQ page, so you can use support questions from your existing web pages when you are creating a Power virtual agent bot, it will help you to create your support Bot within 5 minutes. You don’t want to copy and paste or manually re-create the same content. You can use AI agent-assisted authority to automatically extract and create a relevant suggested topic from your FAQ pages. Microsoft made this sequence of work as very simple easy steps, you can follow the steps below and create your own FAQ business chat Bot.

Build An FAQ Chatbot With Power Virtual Agents

Setup Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents is a software-as-a-service (SaaS). It allows you to easily sign up, create your bot, and embed it into your website and integrate it to the different channels with just a few clicks. There’s no infrastructure to maintain or complex systems to deploy. Provide your work school account email id and click on Sign up /Sign in.

After clicking on Sign up/ sign in, you will get the following screen asking you to set your Bot name. Provide the relevant business bot name.

There are three main steps you need to do while importing FAQ and adding the topic to your bot application.

Import Suggested Topics from FAQ webpage.
Add a topic.
Enable the topics

Import FAQ content

You can follow the below steps for importing topic messages from your FAQ web page

Step 1

Go to the Topics tab on the side navigation pane to open the topics page.

Step 2

On the Topic page, Select the Suggested Topics option on the top navigation pane/ suggested tab button.

Extract FAQ Topics

If you have not imported any topics before, the list of suggested topics will be blank. A link to Get started or Learn more appears instead.

The following screen will appear after clicking on “Get Started”.
You can add multiple webpages at the same time, but Microsoft recommends that you include only a few at a time to keep the list of suggestions manageable.
You can make sure your webpage should be secure with SSL (https://)
If you added a page by mistake, you can select the Delete option before clicking on start.

When you're finished adding pages, select Start. The process can take several minutes, depending on the complexity and number of webpages you added. The message "Getting your suggestions. This may take several minutes" appears at the top of the screen while the extraction is in progress.

After you've successfully extracted content, a number of suggestions will appear. Here, we have added MVP Summit FAQ URL, it’s extracted around 48 FAQs and is displaying that in the suggested topics, you can now review these suggestions to see what you need add to your bot

After adding, you need to do two more steps to complete the process but if you try to test the application, after the suggested topic, you wont get those topic questions from the suggestion, the Bot will reply with the message “ Sorry I am not able to find a related topic“ .

Add a Topic

The import process has been completed, the topic suggestions appear on the Suggested tab. You can just add suggestions without reviewing but the best approach is to review them individually like below to decide which ones you want to include in your bot.

Step 1

Select the Name of Suggestions from Suggestion tab.

Step 2

You can also add or delete multiple topic suggestions at a time. If you select multiple rows from the suggestions tab, you'll see options to Add to topic or Delete.

Step 3

Review the suggestions, and every topic at the end of the conversation will display Survey topic questions like “ Did that answere the question” and the user can reply with "Yes “ or “No” and based on that conversation will continue, if you don’t want to display the conversation survey, you can remove it any time .

Step 4

You can edit Trigger phases and edit the bot's answers.

Step 5

You can press on “Add to the Topic”, after you review suggested topics

Step 6

If the suggested topic is not relevant or a duplicate, you can press delete suggestion for removing the topic.

Once you click on Add to topic, you will get a confirmation message saying, your FAQ topic was added to existing topics.

Enable the topics

Suggested topics are added to the Existing tab with their status set to Off. This way, topics won't be prematurely added to your bot, so you can follow the below steps to enable the topic.

Step 1

Select Topics on the side navigation pane.

Step 2

Go to the Existing tab.

Step 3

For each topic you want to enable, turn on the toggle under Status.

Test Your Bot Application

You're now ready to test your bot. You will test your bot using the built-in Power virtual agent bot Emulator. Start giving the user Input, which you reviewed and enable topic and refer to the below image.

Summary

You have successfully imported a FAQ page in the power virtual agent. I hope you have enjoyed learning about Power virtual agent bot. You can also read my previous power virtual agent articles.

If you have any questions/feedback/issues, please write them in the comment box.