Use Topics, Entities and Actions in Power Virtual Agents bots
Natural language understanding, or the AI’s capacity to grasp a user’s purpose, is a key feature of Power Virtual Agents. Furthermore, identifying items in a user conversation is a basic part of natural language comprehension. Secondly, an entity may be thought of as a data structure that represents a certain sort of real-world topics, such as a phone number, zip code, location, or even a person’s name. We’ll go through how to make and change topics in your Power Virtual Agents bot today.
- Go to the Topics tab on the side navigation pane to open the topics page.
- On the topics page, select New topic.
- Specify a name, description, and one or more trigger phrases for the topic.
- Select Save topic to add the topic to the topics list.
Steps to design the topic’s conversation path:
- Firstly, in the topic details for the topic, you want to edit, select Go to authoring canvas.
- In the second step, Power Virtual Agents opens the topic in the authoring canvas and displays the topic’s trigger phrases. The authoring canvas is where you define the conversation path between a customer and the bot.
- Thirdly, for existing or system topics, a number of nodes will automatically be created. Moreover, you can edit these nodes just as you can for other nodes.
- Next, when you create a new topic, a Trigger phrases node and a blank Message node are inserted for you.
- Then, you can add additional nodes by selecting the Plus (+) icon on the line or branch between or after a node.
There are various choices available when adding a node. Each option specifies which node or nodes will be added into the discussion path.
For adding a node after the Trigger Phrases node, or between Message nodes, you can:
- Ask a question
- Call an action
- Show a message
Steps to Go to another topic
- At first, to automatically have the bot move to a separate topic, select + to add a node, and then Go to another topic.
- Then, In the flyout menu, select the topic the bot should divert to.
Entities and slot filling in Power Virtual Agents bots
The Power Virtual Agents include a collection of prebuilt entities that represent the most regularly used stereotypical information in real-world dialogues, including age, colours, numbers, and names.
Steps to Create Custom Entities
- In Power Virtual Agents, go to the Entities tab on the side navigation pane.
- Select New custom entity on the main menu.
- This opens the entity creation window. Enter a name for the entity.
- Provide the items that you want to be included in the entity; in this example, this is a list of outdoor product category names.
Steps to use entities in a conversation
- Go to the Topics page for the bot you want to edit.
- Open the authoring canvas for the topic you want to add an entity to.
- Select the plus (+) icon and then select Ask a question.
- You can also optionally select items to show as buttons.
Slot Filling
Saving an extracted entity to an object is referred to as slot filling in natural language understanding. Slot filling in Power Virtual Agents refers to storing the extracted entity value in a variable.
Steps to Add actions to a bot using Power Automate
By executing a Microsoft Power Automate flow, we can enable your bot to do an activity. Flows can let you automate tasks or communicate with backend systems. We may also call flows as a standalone Call an action node from within topics. You may also use flows that have already been developed in your Power Apps environment or construct your own using the Power Virtual Agents authoring canvas.
Steps to Create a new flow from the Power Virtual Agents authoring canvas
- Go to the Topics page for the bot you want to edit.
- Open the authoring canvas for the topic from which you want to call a flow.
- Select the plus (+) button below an existing node to add a new node.
- In the node selection window, select Call an action, and then select Create a flow.
Learn more about Advanced Flows
