If you are already using Power Virtual Agents in your power platform solutions or want to start using, then you might be interested in the new Boost conversations feature in Power Virtual Agents. This feature allows you to use the capabilities of OpenAI’s Codex, an AI system that can generate natural language code from plain text commands.
If you never heard of Power Virtual Agents (PVA) before, PVA is a powerful tool that allows you to create intelligent chatbots without coding or AI expertise. You can use PVA to automate common inquiries, provide personalized customer service, and improve your business efficiency.
With the new Boost Conversations feature, you can leverage Microsoft’s natural language understanding capabilities to enhance your bot’s conversational skills.
What is Boost Conversations?
Boost Conversations is a feature that automatically generates topics and responses for your bot based on your existing web content, such as FAQs, product pages, support articles, etc. You can simply provide a URL of your web content and PVA will scan it and create relevant topics for your bot.
For instance, if you have a FAQ page about your product features, PVA can create topics such as “How do I activate feature X?” or “What are the benefits of feature Y?” and provide appropriate responses based on the information on your web page.
Boost Conversations also ensures that your bot’s responses are filtered and moderated to adhere to Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. This means that your bot will avoid offensive, inappropriate, or sensitive language when interacting with users.
How to use Boost Conversations?
Using Boost Conversations is easy and fast. Here are the steps:
- Go to the Power Virtual Agents home page.
- In the side navigation menu, select Create.
- You can also select Create a bot on the Home page or New chatbot from the Chatbots page.
- Select Try the unified canvas (preview). Preview chatbots have (preview) added to their name in the list of bots.
- Enter a name for the bot.
- On the Topics page of the unified canvas (preview), select Add topics from web content.
- Enter a URL of your web content that you want PVA to use as a source for generating topics and responses.
- Select Generate topics.
- Review the generated topics and responses and edit them as needed.
- Publish your bot and test it with real users.
URL Considerations
The URL you provide for the boost conversation capability in Power Virtual Agents represents the scope of content that will be used for generating responses. The URL can have up to two levels of depth and a trailing forward slash. For example, http://www.example.com/level1/level2 would be valid but http://www.example.com/level1/level2/level3 would not. If the URL redirects to another top-level site, that content won’t be included in results. If you set the URL with http://www.example.com all the sites starting with http://www.example.com will be included. The capability won’t generate responses from a URL that points to a website that requires authentication or isn’t indexed by Bing.
To test your bot
- Click on Test your bot at the bottom of the side navigation pane.
- In the Test bot panel, ask the bot questions that take advantage of Boost conversations capability.
Note that: The AI of the boost conversation capability in Power Virtual Agents may have difficulty answering questions that require calculations, comparisons, or form submissions. It also doesn’t remember context across multiple questions. If the bot can’t generate an answer to a question, it will ask you to rephrase it. After two prompts, it will initiate the system Escalate topic. To see how Bing interprets your question against the specified URL, add “site: <your URL here>” to the end of your question.
If you are interested with this new feature, go check out official microsoft docs for more documentation.
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