Power Virtual Agents #3: Build First Chatbot

Introduction

Power Virtual Agents helps you quickly and easily create AI-powered solutions to some of your customer support challenges – no developers or data scientists are required.
This blog will go through the step-by-step process of creating, deploying, and testing the first bot to handle a common customer request.
PVA Chatbot Creation

1. Go to https://powerva.microsoft.com/ and Click on sign in (Work or School account).
2. Select your region/country and click Start Free Trial

3. Name your bot SPEGA Customer Service, Select English as the Language then selects the Environment for the PVA chatbot.

4. Click on create.

Note: Once you click Create, the process of creating the first bot within a new environment can take up to 15 minutes. Subsequent bots will be created much faster.
After you create your bot, it appears in the list under the robot icon on the navigation bar.
Pro Tip: If you’ve created a bot in this environment before, to create another bot select the robot icon on the navigation bar, and then select New bot.

1. Home: Includes shortcuts to Customize your greeting and to the Topics, Publishes, and Analytics pages, as well as links to Power Virtual Agents documentation, a Support community where you can ask questions, and an Idea forum for sharing ideas and leaving product feedback.
2. Topics: where you view, delete, create and edit conversation topics.
3. Entities: To view and create entities that Power Virtual Agents can recognize in customer conversations and load into variables.
4. Analytics: view metrics to monitor how well your bot is serving your customers and find ways to improve it.
5. Publish: Publish the bot for team testing or to engage with your customers.
6. Manage: You can select the Channels (such as your website or Facebook) you want customers to interact with your bot, configure Authentication to let your users sign in to their account with you when using the bot, and extend your bot’s conversational capabilities with Skills.
   

Conversation in Boat

To show the Test bot, in the bottom left corner of the screen, click Test your bot. (If the button says “Hide bot”, then your Test bot is already showing.) At the top of the Test bot, turn on the Track between topics toggle.

At the Type your message prompt at the bottom of the Test bot, type: Hello, and then click the Send button.

The bot will offer a greeting in the Test bot pan.