Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is now generally available

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents – an offering that enables anyone to create powerful chatbots using a guided, no-code graphical interface, without the need for data scientists or developers.

Power Virtual Agents addresses many of the major issues with chatbot building in the industry today. It eliminates the gap between subject matter experts and the development teams building the chatbots, and the long latency between subject matter experts recognizing an issue and updating a chatbot to address it. It removes the complexity of exposing teams to the nuances of conversational AI and the need to write complex code. It also minimizes the IT effort required to deploy and maintain a custom conversational solution by empowering subject matter experts and departments to build and maintain their own conversational solutions.

Are you an HR generalist who wants to build a chatbot to answer common employee questions? You can use Power Virtual Agents to build a chatbot and have it up and running and answering common employee questions in minutes. Or are you a sales manager who wants a chatbot to streamline the sales process? With a few clicks you can embed a chatbot on your mobile app to recommend upsell opportunities based on the customer’s purchase history.

Or perhaps you’re a company who wants to engage with your customers and answer product questions before they buy. With our easy to use no-code graphical designer, those closest to the user can focus on building delightful conversations—no need to focus on the code. And because Power Virtual Agents is part of Microsoft’s low-code Power Platform, integration into existing systems is streamlined with out-of-the-box integration with Microsoft Power Automate and its ecosystem of hundreds of connectors. The journey from signing up, creating a chatbot, connecting it to your backend and deploying it to your site, mobile app, or Teams channel,- or wherever you engage with your users, is streamlined and hassle-free.

What’s more, since Power Virtual Agents is built on top of the Azure Bot Framework, it offers limitless extensibility, and the full power of Azure Bot Framework and Azure Cognitive Services is only a few clicks away. If you need to, you can create custom Bot Framework skills and embed them into your chatbot to create even more complex and highly customized scenarios.

Here are just a few highlights of what Power Virtual Agents can do:

Simple, graphical chatbot creation

Test and maintain chatbots through an incredibly easy-to-use graphical interface. Recognize and act on dozens of common entities in the user’s conversation such as colors, currencies, ages, dates and times, or create your own, and store user information in variables and use them to branch or create complex conversations.

Get started quickly

Just point the chatbot to your website, and it will extract common questions, FAQs, and pre-build topics for you, so you can be up and running in minutes, out of the box.

Avoid repetitive conversations

Imagine chatbots that don’t follow dialog scripts mechanically. Power Virtual Agents intelligently uses all the information available to decide when to ask a question and when to skip it. For example, if the user already provided information earlier in the conversation, the chatbot will remember it and skip asking about it again.

Configure and deploy to multiple channels

Easily embed your chatbot wherever your organization engages with customers such as websites, mobile apps, Facebook, Teams, or any of the dozens of channels supported by Bot Framework.

Easily see what’s working and what you need to improve

Analyze bot and customer conversations to better understand how specific topics are performing, what’s impacting your customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and identify where there is room for improvement. Easily see which conversations are going to human agents and determine which topics to teach your chatbot next.

AI and human partnership

Power Virtual Agents enables your organization to combine the best of virtual agents and human agents to deliver the best possible experience for your users. When the chatbot can’t help, it pulls in a human agent automatically and passes off what it has learned so far. Power Virtual Agents can be easily configured to work with Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service, or you can connect it to the live chat provider of your choice.

Watch a brief overview video of the product, and sign up for Power Virtual Agents to get started building your very own virtual agents!

Omar Aftab
Partner Director of Program Management
Power Virtual Agents