Power Virtual Agents & Bot Framework – enabling everyone to build intelligent chatbots

Power Virtual Agents is Microsoft’s intuitive, graphical, fully-hosted chatbot development platform that empowers everyone – from subject matter experts to professional developers – to easily create and maintain chatbots.

A key feature in Power Virtual Agents is the ability to easily allow bots to act on the user’s behalf – looking up a user account, processing a return, or opening a ticket. The possibilities are endless. As part of Microsoft’s low-code Power Platform, Power Virtual Agents comes with hundreds of pre-built connectors to common back-end systems, enabling quick integration. And, of course, you can also easily call custom APIs and actions as well.

What’s more, since Power Virtual Agents is built on top of Azure Bot Framework it offers limitless extensibility – the full power of Azure Bot Framework and Azure Cognitive Services is only a few clicks away. When more complex conversational capabilities are needed, or if the bot maker needs to supplement their bot with custom code, makers can create and host Bot Framework Skills in their own infrastructure and then call those Skills from within a Power Virtual Agents topic. This popular functionality has proven useful for many enterprise customers seeking to enhance bot dialogs with highly custom capabilities, but it is complex to build and maintain.

Today, I’m proud to announce that we’ve made the integration between Bot Framework and Power Virtual Agents even stronger. By this summer, dialogs coded in Bot Framework will be directly embeddable and executable from inside Power Virtual Agents.

Bot makers will be able to use Azure development tools – such as the Bot Framework Composer – to code up complex dialogs and save them directly into a Power Virtual Agents bot, which will host and execute them. This will make it easier for users wanting to extend PVA capabilities to be able to do so effortlessly, without having to deal with separate Azure hosting, deployment or billing complexities.

With this change, Bot Framework and Power Virtual Agents will work seamlessly together. Customers will have access to an intuitive, fully-extensible SaaS bot development experience that they can easily enhance with code when needed. The result: a bot building experience that truly empowers everyone – from subject matter experts to professional developers – to collaboratively build intelligent, powerful bots.

Check out our Build demo at the link below showcasing this experience, and begin your journey with Power Virtual Agents now by starting a trial today.

Build demo @ https://youtu.be/oJWJA-U4-m8 (Use the Efficiency of Low-Code with the Extensibility to Azure to Design World-Class Chatbots)

Be sure to join our Community to share your ideas, provide your comments, and help drive the future direction of our product development.

Happy bot building!