Power Virtual Agents: 2022 Release Wave 1 – What’s new?

Power Virtual Agents has been providing assistance to organisations to create powerful custom bots using easy and code-free graphical interface without the need for AI experts or teams of developers.

In this blog, we will talk about the latest updates in Power Virtual Agents coming up this year from April to September. The 2022 release Wave 1 will bring improvements in areas such as authoring experience with topic suggestions from bot sessions, the integration with Power Apps Portals, options for data loss prevention and many more.

 

New and Planned Updates

Bot Configuration

To provide further extensibility with other services and features, users can now configure bots to suit the individual needs of their organisation. This will include receiving authentication provider support, augmenting bot capabilities through using the Microsoft Bot Framework skill, improved integration with Microsoft Teams, Facebook and more.

Power Virtual Agents will also enable organisations to protect their enterprise data through adding  DLP policies within Power Virtual Agents topics.

When using the chat authentication settings in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Power Virtual Agents chatbots will be enabled to be aware when a user is signed in and will halt requests for multiple sign in attempts.

 

Core Authoring

Users can create a bot with the no-code authoring canvas and manage how topics interact, how the conversations should flow and what the tone should be like. Previously, bot interactions required explicit trigger phrases from customers. In this new release, Power Virtual Agents will add the ability for customers to proactively trigger bot conversations with full context based on external trigger events such as button clicks. Users will also be able to easily test the bot without having to fully deploy the bot when small changes are made frequently. Lesson topics are also provided to guide the users through topic authoring from simple to complex scenarios and default system topics.  The bots can also be modified to speak in multiple languages of the user’s choice. These features will be available to allow the bots to be more capable of understanding the users request and content to make them relate better.

 

Service and runtime

Power Virtual Agents will make it easier for users to govern their Microsoft Teams-based environments costs through offering inactivity-based environment deletion, cleaning up those environments that are in disuse to allow users to focus on only active projects that are running.

Power Virtual Agents will also enable users to build chatbots within Microsoft Teams. The chatbots can use the stored data in Microsoft Dataverse for Teams or many other data sources using supplied standard connectors. Users that are in Government Community Cloud (GCC) and GCC High will have to ability to build bots in these environments.

 

For application administrators:

  • End-user impacting features to the user experience will be automatically enabled

End-user impacting features must be reviewed by the organisation’s application administrators to allow for release change management and to ensure successful onboarding of new capabilities are released to the market. A full list of the features that are automatically for end users will be outlined in the release plan here.

  • Features that must be enabled by application administrators

The new release wave will contain features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers or business analysts for their end users to gain access. The complete list of features for admins, makers or analysts will be released in the plan here.

 

To learn more about Power Virtual Agents and it’s features, contact us via our website.