Create Your First Bot Using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

Introduction

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) empowers everyone to create no-code Chabots without the involvement of developers & data scientists. PVA helps in minimizing the IT efforts required to deploy and maintain a custom solution.

So, let’s get started by creating a simple bot in PVA.

Visit the site - https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com/en-us/

You will find the below phrase on this site,

Create Your First Bot Using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

Source: https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com/en-us/

Click on “Start Free” and enter your Office 365 email address for getting started, as shown in the below image,

If you are already logged-in, then credentials will be taken automatically and the below screen will be shown, click on Sign in,

Once you click on Sign in, then the below screen will be shown which will show the email address with which the bot will be created,

You will be redirected to the below URL.

https://powerva.microsoft.com/#/

Select your country/region as shown in the below image,

Give a name to your bot, as shown in below image,

Check “More options” also to select your bot environment and then click on Create.

Once you click on the Create button (in previous step), the below screen will be shown stating that a bot is getting created which takes some time (approx. 15 minutes),

The below screen is showing that the bot has been created successfully and is ready to use,

Below are the options available in the left navigation,

Home
Topics
Entities
Analytics
Publish
Manage

In this article, I will discuss about Topics and Publish features of Power Virtual Agents.

Now the question is what is a Topic? In simple words, a Topic is a series of steps in which your bot will respond to the user questions or queries. By default, two categories of topics are available in Power Virtual Agents – User Topics and System Topics.

Go to Topics in the left navigation and click on “New topic” as shown in the below image,

As an example, let’s create a topic with the name “Hello World” and also add “Hello World” as a trigger phrase also. Select Save topic to add the topic to the topics list.

After saving the topic, Go to authoring canvas.

Start creating your bot by entering 'Hello! How are you, this is the first bot' into the first Message node.

Click on “+” below the node and add an Ask a question node. Enter the question text, ‘Which fruit do you like?’ in the Ask a question box. To give the user a choice between different responses, select “Multiple choice options” under Identify.

Add two options for the user, by selecting “+ New option”. Enter ‘Mango’ and ‘Banana’ in the text boxes called 'Options for user'. Each option is presented as a multiple choice button to the user.

Now, the authoring canvas creates separate paths/branches depending upon the number of options (in this case two branches, as we have two options only).

Click the + below each of the condition nodes to add a Message node in each branch.

Add a simple message like ‘Hey, you like Mango!’ in the Mango branch, and ‘Hey, you like Banana!’ in the Banana branch. Select Save at the top.

Now, let’s test the bot. Open the test bot panel from left bottom of the screen. You can turn on tracking to track the flow between topics, which will allow you to follow along with the bot as it executes your dialog.

Type "hello world" in the chat window, and send the message to the bot. You’ll see the top portion of your dialog tree highlighted in green, and you’ll see Mango and Banana presented as user options in the test bot window.

Once you will select another option, then bot will be executed as shown in the below image,

Once you are done with the content authoring in your bot, you can publish your bot to a website by selecting Publish option in the left navigation.

Summary

In this article, we discussed a no-code solution for creating your first Chabot using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents.