Power Virtual Agents: Conversation Boosters

With the release of ChatGPT for public consumption, many people have tried using ChatGPT for various reasons and are realizing the true power that intelligent chatbots can provide us. As a result, chatbots have become a popular tool for companies to deliver quick and efficient services to their end users. However, not all chatbots are created equal, and many fall short in delivering an engaging conversational experience. Enter the new Power Virtual Agents conversation booster feature - a game-changing capability that takes chatbot interactions to the next level by leveraging the power of GPT.

Up until now, Power Virtual Agents chatbots required the bot builder to create predefined topics for any potential conversation paths. The issue with this is that we don’t always know what end users are going to ask our bot, which can create a disconnected user experience. 

With conversation boosters, PVA uses natural language processing to parse through a user’s request, find relevant information from a specified URL with Bing Search, and return a plain language response back to the user.

This means that you can quickly create and deploy a functional bot without having to first manually create multiple topics that may or may not cover all the questions your end users might end up asking.

To help you understand the power of this feature, let’s create a PVA chatbot that can answer questions about Power Apps.

First, I’ll create my “Power Apps Expert Bot” and use the conversation booster feature by pointing my bot to the root website for Power Apps documentation.

Without creating a single topic, I can already test my bot. Let’s ask the following questions:

“How do I build a Power Apps canvas app?”

“What are some popular data connectors for Power Apps?”

“When would I use a Power Apps canvas app over a Power Apps model-driven app?”

In this last response, the chatbot provided me with a link that describes the difference between canvas apps and model-driven apps - exactly what I was looking for.

With minimal effort, I've created a chatbot that can pull information on Power Apps and present it in plain language to an end user. I can further extend my chatbot from here - building out any required topics, embedding Power Automate workflows, customizing the UI, etc.

Finally, not only can we use conversation boosters on external websites, but soon we will be able to point our PVA chatbots to internal resources/documentation. You can request to join the limited preview group here.

Conversation boosters, along with PVA Copilot, is going to completely change how we build bots and the level of intelligence end users expect from their chatbots.