Power Virtual Agents bots as skills with Bot Framework bots – General Availability

We are happy to announce that the feature enabling Power Virtual Agents bots to be used as skills with Bot Framework bots has reached General Availability.

If you have Bot Framework bots deployed in your organization, you can now easily extend them with Power Virtual Agents functionality using this capability.

When you add a Power Virtual Agents bot as a skill, the Bot Framework bot will determine if anything the bot user says matches with any of the trigger phrases in the Power Virtual Agent’s bot.  If there is a match, the Bot Framework bot will automatically invoke the Power Virtual Agents bot and pass the entire user utterance to it to extract any entities and trigger a matching Power Virtual Agents topic.

Additionally, from a Bot Framework bot, you can invoke a Power Virtual Agents bot’s topic with inputs and utilize the outputs it returns.

With this new feature in Power Virtual Agents, you can:

• Explicitly control which Bot Framework bots are allowed to connect to your Power Virtual Agents bot.

  

• Easily download Test or Published bot’s skill manifest, enabling you to test changes in your Power Virtual Agents skill bot before publishing them.

  

• Connect to a Power Virtual Agents skill in Composer using Power Virtual Agents skill manifest.

  

• Call a specific Power Virtual Agents skill topic from a Composer bot.

  

• Pass an input variable to a Power Virtual Agents skill topic from Composer bot.

  

• Receive an output variable from a Power Virtual Agents skill topic in Composer bot.

  

Learn more

For more information, visit the documentation on using a Power Virtual Agents bot as a skill.

Join our Power Virtual Agents community to share your ideas, provide your comments, and help drive the future direction of our product development.