Create and Deploy a Powerful Virtual Agent Chatbots

In this section, we will guide you with the end-to-end experience for creating a chatbot for the first time. Also, we will discuss –

• Firstly, adding topics to the bot
• Secondly, testing content changes in real-time
• Thirdly, deploying bot to a test page
• Analyzing the performance of chatbot once deployed

Since Power Virtual Agents empowers teams to create powerful bots using a guided no-code graphical experience without the requirement for data scientists or developers.

Steps to Create your First Chatbot

• In the first step, go to https://aka.ms/TryPVA in your browser to start. Then on the website, select Try preview and now sign in with the work email address. (Microsoft accounts are not supported at present)
• The second step, we will choose a name for the bot. Example – It can be generic to your organization or specific to the scenario
• Since the bot is created in the default Power Apps environment created when we signed up. But, if we want to specify a custom Power Apps environment for the Power Virtual Agents. This can be done by expanding the More options menu and selecting a different environment.
• Next, after we select Create, the process of creating the first bot within a new environment can take up to 15 minutes. Then Subsequent bots will be created much faster.
• Post few minutes, we will land on the home page and have an opportunity to play around with the bot in read-only mode. Since we can’t save any edits during this time, but can explore the overall user interface. In the meanwhile, we can review additional documentation on authoring topics in your bot.
• Lastly, when the bot creation process completes, the banner changes. Then we will have full functionality in the bot and modify any User or System topic, test out your content changes, or deploy your Chatbot.

How to Create a Topic?

We shall now learn to create a topic –

1. At first, since we have full functionality within our bot, it is suggested to create our own topic i..e, a dialog tree specifying how the chatbot responds to a user’s question.
2. In the second step, select the topics in the side navigation pane, and then select New topic at the top of the page.
3. We can then name our topic and include some trigger phrases representing examples of the type of user questions or utterances that help teach the bot when to respond with this dialog.
4. Post saving the topic, select Go to authoring canvas. It is a graphical dialog tree editor which permits to define bot responses and the overall bot conversation.
5. After that, click on the + below the node, and add an Ask a question node by selecting it in the menu.
6. Then add two options for the user, by selecting + New option. Enter ‘Seattle’ and ‘Bellevue’ in the text boxes called ‘Options for user’. 
7. In the forked conversation path, each node has automatically checked for ‘Seattle’ in one path, and ‘Bellevue’ in the other path to take the appropriate next step.
8. In the end, click the + below each of the Condition nodes to add a Message node in each branch.

Publish your Chatbot

• After you have finalized the content authored in the bot, we can go ahead and publish the bot to a website.
• Start by selecting the Publish tab in the side navigation pane.
• Now, select Publish to activate your bot with a single click. If the publish is successful, a green banner on the top of the page will indicate so.
• Then click on the demo website link under Share your bot to see it in action on a demo website. A new window opens in your browser. But in case this doesn’t happen automatically, check whether a pop-up blocker has been activated and, if so, allow the window to be opened.