Master No Code Chatbots With Power Virtual Agents [Full Course]

Hello and welcome, my name is Devin Knight. Today we have a really exciting day where we will see

virtual

power

agents

in a class called

virtual

power

agents

in one day, so we will be in a very short amount. of time delving into what you can learn with virtual power brokers, well hello again, my name is Devon Knight, I'm the training chair at Pragmatic Work, so I focus on a lot of different training around the power platform and in today's class We're going to go really deep into what you can do with Power Virtual Agents now, for many of you Power Virtual Agents is a very new

course

because it's a very new product that came out last October and added as part of the power platform and therefore may be very new to you, so we will explore not only the basics of what virtual power brokers can do for you, but we are also going to get hands-on to the play and that will be a fun Experiment here, we have a lot of people that are on the stream here with us, but I hope to have it set up so that you can be successful with this because what we have done for you is we have actually given it up front .

It's time for everyone who pre-registered to log in so we can continue along with a tenant that I've really set up again for success in today's class, so let's go ahead and jump in and I want to show you a couple of things here. on my screen to start today, so you'll notice here, of

course

, I have on the top right several things that are going to be really key for today, one of them is the class files, so if you haven't already, you want to Be sure to download the class files and you'll see a link here.

I have some colleagues who are also on the YouTube stream with us who will also share that link and let you follow them. With today's material, once you've downloaded that zip file, you want to make sure you've unzipped it on your workstation somewhere, maybe right on your c drive, so you can easily find it as we go through the class. You're also going to need the credentials I sent you in advance now if you're watching this stream later, of course you can use your own login credentials, the main reason I gave people who signed up at the start advanced session.

The credentials are because there are a few things you will need to configure that could have potential restrictions within your organization. Perhaps your organization does not allow you to personally create your own common data services databases, and I have done so. That in advance for those of you who have signed up now, if you don't see that, if you didn't receive that login information, I want to encourage you to look for it, it might have gone to your spam, but we sent two emails. yesterday and one of them looked like this, it was actually a follow up email that we sent later and this email had their login information as well as a password.

You will see that the login information is blank here, but you should have received a login for If you didn't, I recommend that you contact Matt Peterson who is part of my team and he is also in the chat at right now and has a list of some additional logins that if for some reason you can't. to get one you can contact him and he will have to spell his email correctly although he will actually give you a login so you are ready today and if you signed up in advance he already has a login for you he just gives you the one that has already been assigned to you, so one thing to get you started right away is that I have a special tenant login that I have provided to you that has a lot of things that will actually save you 30 minutes to an hour.

It's worth the time just setting up your environment for the class so it's already ready for you, just make sure you have this email or if you don't have that email, Matt can help you and he won't help you through chat. I would do it. I recommend that you help him by email to make sure he can do it well, so that information will be key for today. Make sure you have it on hand as we move through the first module, as we want to meet our prerequisites. The other thing I want to bring to your attention is that we will be referencing a couple of times throughout the day and we will also send you this link later after class, so if you signed up with us ahead of time, you will get a few things after class, one of them will be our chatbot cookbook and the chatbot cookbook is

full

of information.

This is a 15 page document that has a lot of great information on why you should use

chatbots

. It's great to do this. roi if you're going back to your boss or maybe you're the one trying to make this decision of whether you should use

chatbots

or not, no. We have this great cookbook that really supports the reasons for using chatbots, so I recommend it, if you don't go ahead and download it from here, we'll also send it to you after the class is over, okay, so let's start again. new. My name is Devin Knight. Briefly about me.

I'm the president of training, so we have two divisions at Pragmatic Works Consulting and Training. I run the training side of our business. I am also a Microsoft Data Platform mvp, which simply means that Microsoft has recognized me for evangelizing their products and I have also written several books on Power Platform, many of them on SQL Server, as well as Power Bi Power Automates and PowerApps, and very soon we will publish a new book that will cover the entire Power Platform, so you will see that. I'll be leaving very soon. Also this is just to tell you a little about myself.

Where am I from? I contribute to a local Power Bi user group. The Jacksonville Power Bi User Group. So I'm from Jacksonville, Florida, and it's really the I'm just pointing that out to tell you where I'm coming from and finally, if you're really interested in following along and reading more of the content that I create, you can follow me on my blog at dot devonnitesql.com, so so feel free to participate. Check it out to connect with me later and you can also check out my Twitter if your Twitter person and my email are there too, so we have a pretty

full

day, we have a lot of material to cover in a short amount of time. time we'll have a break probably about halfway through uh we'll take a break just a reminder that class will be held earlier between 11 and 2 o'clock eastern time so that's eastern time make sure you adjust accordingly your time zone, but we have a lot of material to cover, so let's quickly jump into it.

I'm not going to just stick to the overview here, we're going to jump pretty quickly to actually getting into some of the material, but we're going to get into, of course, some introductions. This is also part of the reason why I wanted to make sure that I gave you some prerequisites ahead of time where I have that login information that will help you. You skip some of the previous steps that aren't really relevant to virtual power agents, so we'll help you skip some of those things and then we'll see how you can start developing your first power. virtual agents what that's going to entail and then we're going to talk about things like power automate, how power automate integrates into power virtual agents to really expand your capability and allow you to do more than you can do with power virtual agents alone, so that Power Automate is a great way to expand capacity and then in the last module, we'll focus on the optimizations you can make with internal Power virtual agents.

I'll note here that our last section, the section on optimization, a lot of this is more theory, so you'll actually find that a lot of that will be more discussion and we may even be able to jump through some of those areas a little quicker. just because I want to make sure I show you the practical experience. Pieces more than anything else today I want to make sure that you have a chance to see how I would do these items really well, so let's jump right into our first piece here, which is about getting familiar with power. virtual agents as a whole so if you're not really familiar with it again it's a pretty new tool so it's okay if it's new to you but I want you to get familiar with what the tool can actually do and if I'm not very familiar with chat bots in general, what chat bots do for you, what chat bots can do to help your organization and it's all about automation and trying to give a personal feel to an automated task of interaction with external clients or even internal employees, so a lot of people don't think about using chatbots internally, but it certainly can be done that way too, so again I mentioned a couple of times that virtual power agents are part of a larger system. great called power.

The platform and power platform are packed with various low-

code

platform applications that allow you to do things like reporting and analysis that are done through power bi. It also allows you to create your own business applications through power applications and that is a low

code

application that allows you as a citizen developer to create your own application, you will hear that term citizen developers a lot when referring to power platform, you will also be able to use things like power automate power automate is a great tool for workflow automation and allowing you should take these tasks that are kind of recovery tasks that can be automated in some way and in fact, can automate those processes and eventually , today's focus is on empowering virtual agents and empowering virtual agents is about building these intelligent chatbots that can not only automate conversations with customers, but also make them feel personal and practical so that they can carry out customer requests. customers and respond, not just respond to them, but also take additional actions, and this whole power platform has a lot of interconnectivity.

Among the various PLA tools, there are hundreds of data connectors that all the different systems can use, you have things like external capabilities with portals, you even have an AI generator that is actually connected to each of these tools, there are artificial intelligence that can really improve. what power bi power automates power applications and power virtual agents can do everything in one and then the common data service is this kind of global platform to store data and allow you to actually interconnect with smaller data subsystems, so There are many things at stake. With all of these different elements, when you think about chatbots, there are a lot of different reasons why people choose chatbots and it really starts with this idea that if you think about yourself, most people generally try to start with a self-service solution. .

First, I know I had an incident with Amazon recently where I had something that didn't ship or didn't arrive in a timely manner. My first instinctive reaction is that I'm going to try to see if I can figure it out. I do this myself with some kind of automated chat system because on Amazon really a lot of different, big companies have automated chatbots, so my first goal is how can I solve this problem myself using some kind of interactive component that they have, so it's 66 and you? In fact, we'll look at where these statistics come from here in a moment. 66 percent of people try to use self-service first instead of contacting a live agent for help, so there is definitely a need for this as you can see here and then 90 of customers expect this kind of consistency or continuity across channels, meaning that if you were to actually call and speak to someone live, you would expect the same experience that you would have if you were interacting with an automated system and all of this, of course, is leading. about how you can design powerful virtual agents so that they feel like they have continuity between live people, as well as the chatbot capability and finally, the last thing here is that 59 channels are managed in silos, so what does that mean? managing silos means you have a lot of subsystems behind the scenes, maybe you have a marketing platform, maybe you have a CRM in the background, you have all these different subsystems in the background and often each of them are managed in silos , meaning they are not interconnected, they are not.

It is very well interconnected with your chat bot, which also means that it is difficult for your chat bots to be able to access those various subsystems and produce results and action items and that is one of the things that powerful virtual agents excel at is that they can actually tap into those various subsystems that you have through API or through Power Virtual Agent togiving you the ability to use those various subsystems that you have that are not connected and that are isolated from everything else, but still use them within your capable chatbot, uh. tool here, okay, so chatbots are great, right, I'm talking about them, I'm talking about them like they can solve all the problems, but they certainly can't do it well, eh, chat, there are some problems that sometimes people consider when it comes.

For chatbots, one is that chatbots can be expensive to create and maintain and as you move forward you will see that powerful virtual agents actually answer some of these problems, but in general, chatbots can be expensive to maintain and expensive to create when You have to have a developer do all the work for you, so will you hire a full-time developer for several months so you can develop a chatbot for yourself? When it comes to tools like the powerful virtual agents that it really brings to the data consumer. or should I say that the citizen developer has the ability to create the chatbot themselves and define what the chatbot will do so that that ability is given to the subject matter expert and the subject matter expert is in charge of defining how the chatbot goes to answer questions that come from your clients.

The other thing is that there is often this impedance. impedance between the subject matter expert with the answers and the developer or data scientist who is creating the chatbot, so it's often a big obstacle where this rift occurs between the person developing the solution and the person who has all the answers and also empowers virtual agents. you have a kind of solution for that where your citizen developers, that subject matter expert, is actually the one who's also building the solution and then of course chatbots aren't necessarily going to be as useful unless they plug into the backend. .

Systems that have the answers and again power virtual agents have the ability to leverage either through an API or using Power Automate to connect to the various subsystems that you have and generate answers for your customers, so really the idea here It is Virtual Power. agents is that you are meant to interact naturally with your customers, you are meant to be able to interpret things through AI, so if a customer asks a question one way but you don't expect it in that exact way , you can interpret it through the AI ​​capabilities that are built in, there are a lot of Azure cognitive services that are built into the powerful virtual agents and then you also have this continuity again that is really enhanced when you can go from a chatbot to a live user so you have the ability to pass the chat. bot interactions and chats with a live person and that's a great capability that's built in and then as we mentioned a couple of times, chatbots actually have the ability to take action with virtual internal power agents, they have the ability to do it so that every time someone wants to log into their account, they can actually do it within the chat bot itself, they can log in and produce information that would require a login to send to users, so there is all This interconnected capability built into Powerful Virtual Agents actually does go far beyond what the most traditional chatbot can do, so again, who are Powerful Virtual Agents for?

Well, it's really designed for multiple groups, one is for your customers, so your external customers that they will interact with and ask questions. It's certainly intended for them, but it's also intended for the subject matter expert, the subject matter expert on the types of questions that customers would ask, typically they will be those who create the chat bot topics that their customers will interact with. I still see that in some cases, in many cases you will still need some IT or developer involvement to integrate it with your website or integrate it with Skype or integrate it with Teams.

That integration piece will often still need a developer in some cases because there will be some integration steps and some embedding steps to embed it on your website, but the core pieces and the longest part of developing any chatbot is defining the topics and define what those are like. The interactions will work between your customers and you or in this case your automated chatbot, so the subject matter expert is really the one who needs to learn more about powerful virtual agents because they will define how it works and how you interact. with your clients, so let's talk a little about the life cycle of a virtual power agent project.

What does it look like to create a project for virtual power brokers? There are actually several steps here that will be key in the first part of the creation. The bot and the use of the interactive capabilities that the graphical user interface that is provided with the internal virtual power agents is very simple. It is very simple to get started with virtual power brokers. What's difficult is that it doesn't begin and end with a simple creation. There is this kind of life. cycle where you go back and make constant improvements, there won't be a powerful virtual agents project that will be done and after the first iteration and you're done with it for good, you'll often revisit it to see how your customers interact with it. and how you can improve it, so of course you'll start by creating some topics and you can create topics very easily, even telling virtual powerful agents to like an FAQ page that you have so you can point virtual powerful agents to a page web and can interpret topics automatically for you.

Today we will show you a little and it will allow you to create themes automatically; then you'll be able to create your own themes using the natural language capabilities that are built in and you can do things like variables so you can pass values ​​back and forth and interact with your chatbot very easily and then of course we've mentioned a couple of times that now you can integrate your bot with power automates power automate really gives you this expanded capability so that your chatbot is not very limited, it has a lot of things that it can do and then as I mentioned, you can have some interaction with the developers before, even can cause developers to create new skills.

You may have heard of Alexa skills. If you have an Alexa at home, they have skills you can add. You can do the same with your chatbot so you can have a developer create this integration with an API from one of your systems. and being able to integrate that into your chatbot as well, that's kind of an extended capability, it's not something you have to do, but you can certainly add additional features if you need to. The next step would be to take my bot and then basically. submit it to any type of bot framework channel, that would be how I would integrate it with teams or how I would integrate it with my website or the different systems that I want to integrate my bot with is the next step, so I would publish it and then put it to arrangement of these different systems that I integrate and interact with and then the last step, which of course is kind of a loop, will start again once it gets to this last step and it will monitor the bot. for performance and make sure that it's actually solving the problems that you anticipated it should solve so that you have the ability within the analytics piece side to see which bots are most successful, which topics specifically are most successful and then you can look and see how many times that topic has had an escalation or how many times that topic has been how to resolve the solution and so you can actually interact and see from a reporting standpoint how successful your bots have been so again the powerful ones virtual agents.

It's built on the power platform that we've talked about, to a large extent, the couple of pieces at the bottom here, on the bottom left, I'll highlight a little bit more in depth. It is also built on the Microsoft bot framework, this is great. The powerful thing about this is that this is actually the piece that many developers use to develop chat bots as a bot framework, but you are given that bot framework capability in this tool designed by citizen developers that allows end users or experts to in the matter take advantage of it. of the bot framework without having to know the nitty-gritty of how to define it, you just need to know how to basically use this nice GUI to create this conversation with your customers.

It is also used in addition to Azure cognitive and cognitive services. Services are what give you the AI ​​ability to be able to interpret the things that people ask and say, Oh, they asked for this, they really mean this, so you can interpret what a customer says as something else based on the capabilities. of AI. which are built into Azure cognitive services and the good news is you don't need to know anything about those things, you don't need to know anything about the bot framework, you don't need to know anything about cognitive services because the virtual power agent it's built on top of them and makes it so that it actually works without you having to be an expert in all those other more technical aspects of bot creation.

So, in a very quick summary of this section, we talked about the capabilities that it has. with powerful virtual agents that is designed for multiple people, that is really customer focused and has this connectivity throughout this extensive extensibility extended with things like Power Automate as well as advanced skills that your developers can create and it is built on top of the bot. Microsoft. framework, so there's a lot of great capabilities here, so what we're going to do in our first practice, we're already jumping into our first practice in the first few minutes, here we're going to set up and do I'm sure you're really ready to go to the class, so I had shown it on the screen before and I'm going to open it again one more time.

You should make sure you have the course files downloaded, which you can do. See at the top right here, also known as dot ms slash and you can read the rest and again, this class is based on the power in a day virtual agent material, so make sure you have it downloaded and unzipped on your machine a time you do it. See files that look like this now. I put my own little instructor file folder here for myself, but it will have all of these other files that you see here available and something that we'll use throughout the day. to start with lab one so I recommend it and ideally you have multiple screens today if you don't it's not the end of the world but I recommend you have multiple screens because you're going to want to have the lab file. open it up although I'm going over it with you, there will be a few times you'll want to copy and paste things from the labs because it will save you a lot of typing time, so let's move on. and open lab number one and you can double click on it to open it.

I already have it open here and I have good news for you. Lab number one is one of the longer labs, but I've actually done a little bit of work. a little bit of legwork to help you skip a lot of the work that you have here because a lot of the work that you're going to find in the first two tasks let me zoom out here for a moment, you'll see that I'm actually going to have you start on page 19 in the lab number one, the reason for this is that the first 18 pages tell you how to set up your environment and I have done all this for you, so the first 18 pages are removed, you can skip them and you will start with me on task number three.

Now the key part of this works so you can skip the first 18 pages. You will have to use the login I provided you that has the information. which you'll use to log in, so that's going to be pretty key, again, we emailed Matt Matt Peterson, who's in the chat with you, can give you that information as well. I provided his email above so you can get that login. Alright, one thing that's also worth mentioning as we get into some practical things here is that we chose to use YouTube streaming here, YouTube live because it allows you to rewind at any time, so if you feel like it, you want to follow along. certainly you can, I would say it's not necessary, but we provide you with that login information and if you ever feel like there's a moment where I'm going too fast, know that you can always rewind a little bit and quickly. and you can go back a step and see what I did again, so if you're working with a screen today, feel free to pause at any time and come back and see what I did and then you can catch up again so we can have the ability to keep up to date very easily, newly built within the streaming platform, okay, good deal, so now that we have the kind of prerequisites of how we're going to do this, let's start over on page 19 of labs number one and the first step here is to log in to make.powerapps.com so you can start yourSure, I know some of this is a kind of prerequisite setting, it's not about diving right into powerful virtual agents from the start, but rather getting us to a point where we can integrate. with these other tools later, okay, so we have the selection here, now we have pointed it to our environment, we have pointed it to the entity for device orders, so we have everything set as the last item that We'll go ahead and save this by pressing save at the top right, okay, press save and then go ahead and come back once you're done saving there, we come back by pressing the back button at the top left here where it says. return the item, okay and then the last step that we're going to do here is the same last step that we did in the previous one: we're going to activate this automatic flow of energy to activate the flow that you will reach. turn it on here, yeah right, so just a reminder if you're struggling to follow some of these little steps here, make sure you remember that.

You're on YouTube so you can rewind to me. You can take a step back. and go back to where I was if you want to see what I did a second time you can press the little rhyme button on youtube and it will allow you to review something if you missed a step that I did that will allow you to catch up pretty easily so we have the solutions, are the flows that are inside that solution activated again so that we can use them, these, this again in this first module, we are setting up the stage for the things that we are going to do later and we are not going to go too deep into the energy automation, mainly because we're going to ease our way into it and the first module of this class really focuses on how to prepare for later, okay, so we've already taken care of this so you can close the tab that we had open , okay, and this will take you back to the slot machines that you're already on and the last thing we did.

What we're going to do is import a Power Apps app and we're going to import a canvas app, so if you're following the labs, we're already on page 35 and lab number one and What we're going to do in this lab is import an application that is part of the class files, so again you should have downloaded those class files ahead of time, but we'll go to them under the applications section. here at the top left of powerapps okay so if you don't see apps you might not be in powerapps and you might need to make sure you're looking at make.powerapps.com here but you'll go to apps and with apps internally we're going to import a canvas app and what we're going to do with this is a canvas app where we're going to launch the app very briefly, we're going to do a little interaction within the app and the reason we do this is so we can log some data in the common data service database.

Basically, we want to have some predefined databases for some order information, so that when we start working with virtual power. agent chatbot will have some reference of some data where maybe we have an order where we are trying to place an order so we will select that we want to import the canvas app and we will select that we want to upload a canvas app again we will select a zip file which is in the class files, okay, and the zip file is called App Power Virtual Agent in a day, so go ahead and select upload here and it will be I'll select the file called App Power Virtual Agent in a day, so make sure you have that file selected when you click Slow Down, and then press Open, OK, so select App Power Virtual Agent one day and again, these come from the class files, so make sure you go into the class files that we have downloaded and select the app power virtual agent by day and click open once you do that it will take a few moments for it to recognize the file and recognize that it is a power app and not just a random zip file that has and then once you spend a few moments with it, sometimes it may take a few minutes once you're done, you'll see your screen update to look like this So, the app inside the zip file is actually recognized and your last step here is to import it, so at the bottom right you'll see there's an import option.

You'll go ahead and select to import this power app that you have. selected ok so go ahead and select import and again that will take a few moments but when your app has been successfully imported you will see a little success symbol that will appear and again the reason for a lot of these different elements that do that will help us show how Power Platform integrates with all other elements of Power Platform. Again, Power Platform has four different tools. The only one we won't really touch today is you and Power Bi. We're still going to see some integration of Power Bi within Power Virtual Agents because that's what's used for Power Virtual Agents dashboard and analytics.

You're not necessarily building anything within Power Bi, but all the other Power Platform tools will be integrated. together nicely here, so it looks like mine has my app imported successfully, the way I can tell is at the top here, you'll see the little success sign here, letting us know that we've imported it successfully and so on. Now, the last real steps we have here are to generate some test data for our virtual power agent. Now, the way we're going to do this is we're going to interact with this application that we just imported to do this.

You're going to go to the left side and select apps again. Okay, so go to the left side inside the sound and internal power apps and select apps and then you'll select the app here called device order app. and we're going to kick this off very briefly, we're going to select something that basically interacts with the app to generate some data for us and then we're going to move on, so we're going to select the device ordering app here and then. In a few moments the application will start. You may also see a message asking you to allow permissions.

When you open the app, it will go ahead and select allow. You should notice that this is the case if you are logged in. With our little test accounts or our demo accounts that we're using today, you should notice that it actually points to those demo accounts that we've set up for you, so you can see here that it's kind of a request. permission in the common data service with the login that we have in our demo account and then it is also trying to get a connection in the Office 365 user connector here, so once you see this pop up, you will just click on allow and you are allowing applications to have connectivity on your common data service once you have done that it will launch the application.

This is an application that was actually developed as part of the application in a day, so if you have ever taken any powerful application. If you specifically train the app in a day class, then you've probably seen this app before. This is actually a device ordering app where you can order an app for your users or maybe for yourself and you can use it to compare multiple products together. and what we're going to do is use this to generate some data that will then be leveraged within the powerful virtual agents, so if you follow the process, you'll move forward. and select that we want to see one of the devices, let's say we asked you to vacuum here, we'll select this product and then at the bottom right, you'll select that you want to compare an item, you just go Basically, to give you more details about that item, select that item and then press compare.

This will show some sort of details screen or a shipping screen where you can submit the order for this product, so this is the last step that you have within powerapps all you are going to do is actually two more clicks, everything What we're going to do is click submit device request at the bottom right and then once you do that, one more form will launch. for you and all you have to do is say, "Hey, the device request was submitted successfully," click OK, so again the goal of what we're doing here is to set up and prepare some data for our later module , so once you press ok, actually we are done with all the prerequisites, we are done with setting up power automate, we are done with powerapps, so go ahead and click ok on the device ordering app and we are ready to go, so this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to go back, you can close the power apps for now, you can even close the other one, but I'm going to leave this one open for now and we'll go back through the slides to Continue to our second module, so this is what I know and forgive me.

I know there are a lot of steps there, many of which are really setting us up for success in the future, which is why the slide actually said prerequisites and creating the environment, believe it. or not starting on page 18 saved us about 45 minutes or an hour of a predefined configuration there, so there was a lot of help I did ahead of time, even though there were still a lot of configurations we had to do. do together, but what we're going to do now is now that we've met the prerequisites, we're going to explain how you can create your first application, so now all of this is going to focus on empowering virtual agents and how are we going to get started and how do we start building our own application here?

So let's go ahead and get into so we've already talked about this our agenda here so when you start with virtual internal power agents, you're going to do that. create a bot so the first thing you are creating with the unit of work inside a powerful virtual agent is called a bot and then inside those bots create topics, the topics you create can be user defined topics that actually create it yourself or there are system themes now when you initially create a bot there are several user defined themes that are created for you and there are also several system themes that are created for you so we will get into that here in a few .

In moments you'll see that there are several, basically, template conversations so you can learn how to make powerful virtual agents just by starting to create on yourself, so the system topics will be things more like uh, I want to finish the i i' I'm going to finish all of them. my conversations as standard, so I'm going to start this to send people to a survey. Sending people to a survey is an example of a system theme that has been predefined for users. to be all of you now, when you're going to create a theme, there's actually this kind of process that you're going to do, so it's going to start, of course, you define a bot, you're going to create new themes, themes that you can think about. like a conversation you're having with a user, so if a user logged into your chatbot and said: I need a refund, you'd probably have a topic focused on product refund, so product refund could be the name of one of your themes and then within your theme you will have things called triggers which we'll look at here shortly and those triggers will be trigger phrases that your users will have to type to initiate interaction with the theme, okay?

Now you don't have to type the exact words that you have as a trigger phrase, that's actually where part of the powerful virtual agents' artificial intelligence capabilities are activated if they type something similar or similar enough to a trigger phrase that you After enter, it will start the topic anyway, so the process here is that you will create a topic, then you will create this conversation tree where you will have how the conversation will flow, then you will test the conversation or test the bot and then publish the bot so that the others can try it out and you'll be able to publish it on your website and then you'll look at the measurements and analytics to see how successful the bot has actually been once you've analyzed it and looked at the analytics within the bot and seen how successful it is at solving problems.

That's when it will go back through the cycle and review and revise your bot based on you. I've seen that maybe your bot isn't as successful as you'd hoped, so you can go in and tweak some of your themes to get it to connect and solve more problems, so it's kind of multiple cycles through uh. The process here is fine, so to create a new chat, but we'll go through these slides pretty quickly because we'll look at it ourselves here in a moment, but to create your own chatbot, you're going to go to power va powervirtualagent. microsoft.com we'll do that here in a moment and then you'll select that you want to create a new chatbot.

That's okay, if you haven't activated virtual agents before you are asked to register. for a testalso, so we might see it here in a few moments, but it's very easy to get started and then to interact with it, you can see some of the system themes as well as the user themes that have been created for you. I mentioned earlier that there are actually four user themes that were predefined for you and that are really there to help you learn how to use powerful virtual agents on your own, so you'll see those four themes available to you and really take advantage of some of those themes to start too and then the eight topics of the system are more things like greetings escalations end of a conversation different things that are somewhat common within chatbot conversations then we can see the trigger phrases of the conversation now again the trigger phrases are what will be used for start a topic, so when a topic won't start unless one of the trigger phrases is invoked, if you look at the screenshot we have on the right side, the topic is problems with your lawn, so maybe actually , this is a company, in fact, you can see the company name.

This is trugreen, they were one of Microsoft's case studies with power virtual agent. True Green is a lawn care service that likes fertilizers and stuff like that, but you can see that one of their conversations or one of their topics revolved around problems with your lawn, so someone would come in and have a problem. with his grass and he would write one of the trigger phrases that you see on the right, so these are The types of trigger phrases, I know they are a little blurry because there is a screenshot here, but if someone would write some of the types of phrases triggers that you see here, it would start the topic called problems with your lawn, okay, and so we go.

To see that experience here as we move into this as well, now again, the trigger phrases don't need to be exactly what appears from your user, it does use AI capabilities to analyze what the user types to trigger everyone's topic. modes. Once you've created the theme, it'll launch the author canvas and the author on the canvas actually looks a little bit like Power Automate and it's a tree view where you're actually working through this tree view. where you can create this conversation tree about how you'll interact with your customers, so the trigger phrases will be at the top and then the interactions, like the questions you'll ask customers or the messages you'll send them. you are going to send to your end users your customers will appear inside the conversation tree from there, once you have created the conversation tree you will test your bot to use the built-in testing capability, there is actually a test bot option which, When you select it, it allows you to not only test the bot to see how it will interact from what you have created, but you will also be able to see how it flows within.

You can see your topic in the middle part of your screen or on the right part of your screen, you will be able to see where it is within your conversation tree and this guides you and helps you understand how the success of your conversations actually It is because you can test it within the testing capacity. Once you've tried it, you feel pretty confident about it. You can publish it to a demo site and this is quite easy to achieve for the purpose of the demo site. that you can pass your chatbot to other colleagues before placing it on your website or your team site or any integration you want, the demo website allows you to deliver the powerful virtual agents that you have created, the bot that you have created for others to try out, interact with, and give you feedback without making it public to everyone on your website, so the demo site is a great way to be able to test outside of yourself.

I mentioned testability. What we had here is more for your own purposes, since you are developing the solution, you can test it, but then the demo site is more for other users within your other colleagues, basically to test the site for yourself as well, okay, so that this is It's just kind of a little summary of what we've done. This actually includes some of the analytics that we'll be able to see over time and we'll also be able to see things like churn rate. people started a chat with our chatbot but didn't actually finish it how many escalations we had how many resolutions we had all of these things will be really important as we finalize our chatbot and start making improvements to it over time Okay, okay, just a Summary: We talked about Energy Virtual Agents being part of the Energy Platform, it's built on top of the common data service, that's why we had to have that environment within a CD environment ready to go and it also offers this really pleasant. graphical interface that we're about to see here in a few moments to create our solution, so we're ready to jump into lab number two and in lab number two we're going to start building our first chat bot, okay, again.

If you're following the class files, you're going to want open lab number two to build your first chatbot and this one we're going to start from the beginning, so if you're following along there will be no problems starting at the top and we're going to work together. to review it, so lab number two here and I'm going to go ahead and close my presentation deck here and reopen my web browser because what we're going to do that, by the way, the first steps here start on page two, but the use case for this one is you work for a retail company called contoso so contoso is a company that Microsoft uses a lot as a sample retail company and uh the retail company contoso is having a lot of success and their customer base has grown quite a bit and what we would like to do is make our customer service scale much better than it can now.

The live chat capabilities that we have with live chat, customer service reps are getting overwhelmed and so we want to see if we can help some of our customers through our chat bot capability and empower virtual agents. that way. that a lot of this could be automated instead of always having to have dozens of people handling the interactions, so to do this we are going to have and be put in charge of creating a chat bot as a subject matter expert and customer service to contoso again , we don't have to be someone who is in this, we can be this type of citizen developer to develop our own solution here so that others can interact with it, okay, to do that we are going to start again by building our own virtual agents, we are going to do this by going to our web browser and you can open a new tab if you want or you can leave powerapps, we will no longer be in powerapps and instead we will go to power va, which is powervirtualagent.microsoft.com.

Okay, take a moment in your web browser, go to power va and once you're there, it will ask you to log in. Remember that you are if you are following. I recommend that you log in with the account I shared with you, which has many of these common data service capabilities pre-configured that we just connected a few moments ago to the flows. All of that is done, hopefully, within that account that we share. with you now because this is the first time I've logged in to this account using Power Virtual Agents, it's asking me to sign up for a trial and what this tells you, by the way, is that it recognizes that my login is still me.

I'm still logged in as logged in with Inside Power Virtual Agents, but you may be prompted to log in again. There is a possibility that you will be asked to log in again and if you do, then you will be logged in. with the account that I provided you, so I'm going to go ahead and press start free trial, so we're going to start a test of powerful virtual agents on the demo accounts that were provided to you and then We're going to create our first bot so that the bot that we're going to call really you can call it whatever you want, call it your company name, I'm going to call mine pragmatic works service, but you can call yours, uh, whatever you want, yeah If you're like the True Green case study, you can put the case of True Green, customer service, if you want whatever name you want, so you will name the bot and then you will tell it what language the bot should be in and in our case we are going to do that.

I'm going to be doing English throughout the course here, so I'm going to make sure to select English here too right there, US English and then this part is very key, hopefully you didn't rush to do this before me because you want to make sure Make sure the environment you select is not the default one. You're actually going to change this to the lab in the development lab management environment, so make sure you worked hard to configure that environment so it's ready for what we're about to do now, so make sure you change this to use the development lab management environment because that's where we have our flow integration, that's where we have our data. stored, so having the correct environment selected is very important.

I'll show you if you accidentally selected the wrong environment and hit create. I'll show you where you can delete this and delete this bot and recreate it. I'll show you where you can do it. So you're going to go ahead and hit create once you have the name, language, and environment selected and then hit create. This will take just a few moments here to create the bot, but once we've done that, we're all ready to move. Let's move on to task number two within the lab and task number two is that we're basically going to do a little review of the different elements that we have within the virtual power agents, so let's take a few moments to load, there it goes. and you could get a little bit, you could explore some of the documentation here if you wanted to.

In my case, here I'm just going to tell you that I want to explore the bot so we can go ahead and get started with it. press explore bot now, I mentioned it a few moments ago, you can actually see at the top here that it's still creating the bot, but we can explore it a little bit right now. There are a few different elements that are still being added to the bot itself, but I As I mentioned earlier, if you accidentally selected the wrong environment and needed to recreate the bot, you can do that by going to the little top bot icon here and this is essentially, you don't need to do This if you feel like you did it. everything correctly, but if you accidentally selected the wrong environment or you don't like the name you created for it, you can get here where it says nubot or add a new bot under the bots panel and you can add a new bot now.

The reason it's not allowing me to do this yet is because it's still creating the bot that we have here, but once it's done creating the bot and you refresh your screen, you may need to refresh the screen here a little once let him do it. That and the bots are just being created, it looks like he's still working on it at the moment. You will then see the ability to create a new bot, so this one has to finish before we have the ability to do that, so don't worry. This will be done here shortly and then we can do it if we need to, so it will select a new bot, that's just if you feel like you made a mistake on the previous screen where we were selecting the environment, the environment again is pretty. important, you want to use the development lab manager, okay, so while we wait for this to finish assembling all the necessary files, let's do a quick little tour of the different areas that we have on our screen, so if we focus our attention on the left side you'll see that there are several different nodes here that you can select and interact with, in fact, before I get too deep into this, let me even expand the main one.

Oh, I can't do it yet until this It's finished assembling, let me zoom in like this for now, so a couple of things here under the home screen you'll find things like the documentation, you'll find support, the support community, you'll find a forum ideas if you want. send ideas on how to power up the virtual agent, what you'd also like it to do basically, the home screen is a bunch of shortcuts, shortcuts to all kinds of different things that you're going to need, where you can create other topics where you can hit publish . button where you can see analytics is a little realm here where you can find all the shortcuts to the elements below you will find themes and this is where you will probably spend most of your time in the themes area. where you will create those new topics as we saw in the previous slides where let's say, for example, that I have problems with my lawn.

I would create a new theme to be able to handle that scenario and this is where I can manage themes where I can edit themes where I can delete themes where I can create new themes. I can also find suggested topics here, so we will learn about suggested topics later, so there are manythings that you have within the topic area and that you will spend. like I said, most of your time in that realm, the next one here is entities, now entities will be where you can create entities that can be leveraged inside powerful virtual agents and basically this is a way that you can preload different options . that your users can select, so imagine you are working for a pragmatic customer service job here and you sell hardware, you sell things like various devices, like Samsung devices, Acers, you have Microsoft devices, all of the above and you want that every time come a user. enter to write and say they have a problem with their device, you want to be able to ask them what device they have and if they write samsung series 7, you want to have an entity that has a list of devices to be able to make sure you understand the device they are talking about because if they just type the text and you don't know what the device reference means, then it can be a little bit, you can basically divert your chat into different areas based on the entity selection so you learn a little bit more about the entities later, but here is where you can predefine possible values ​​that your users could type.

This is also where you can create things as synonyms so I can have them if a user types on Samsung series seven, I can have a synonym for that is uh samsung, so Samsung can select it based on that. I don't even have to create a synonym for it. It is smart enough to detect that there is some smart match with the Samsung series. 7 and just the word samsung, so some really cool things you can do there, the next one we have is analysis, this is where you'll also spend some time once you feel like you've got the bot pretty well designed. then test it a lot and then use analytics so you can verify that it's doing what you think it should be doing and this will give you various metrics on things like resolutions and escalations and all kinds of things that will tell you how well your bot is actually serving to their clients, so you'll find a lot of good information there.

Below you will find that publish, publish allows you to, as the name implies, publish it so that you can take advantage of it on your various channels or if I'm even trying to test it within the demo site. You'll use the publish option here so you can pass this on to your other users and then inside the admin section, it looks like my bot is finally created. You can see that I can now expand this within the Manage Manage section. You have the ability to define which channels your bots will be available on if you have any additional authentication for APIs.

Additional APIs that you want your users to be able to authenticate within. the chat itself, so imagine you have a chat that's enabled within Microsoft Teams and you want to access something like your sales force. Well, Salesforce is obviously a completely different product that is not Microsoft and then you have Microsoft Teams here and these. They're usually very isolated from each other, what you can do is create within the chatbot itself, where a user can type their username and password and authenticate to these other subsystems like Salesforce and still have a conversation and get information from Salesforce.com back to Microsoft Teams via chat, so there are some cool capabilities you can do during authentication here and then the last one I'll mention here is the skills, this is where I would really trust a developer.

This is kind of like me. As I mentioned Alexa Skills earlier, this is where you can rely on a developer to create your own custom skills that take advantage of various APIs that you have that you want to be able to integrate into suchatbot, so there's a cool capability that's under the admin section , now I mentioned before that my chatbot was still being created and because the bot was still being created, I couldn't actually go to the new bot option here, but now. which has now finished creating, I can go to the BOP dashboards and you can see that I can create a new bot once I have a new bot.

I can also delete the old ones, so here you have the possibility to change things if necessary. Alright, good deal, so just to let you know, we're about an hour and five minutes in right now, just to give you a little window of time. What we'll probably do is finish this lab, so we'll probably be there in an hour. and a half or so and then we'll take our break, so another 20 minutes or so we'll take our first break, so if you're looking at the clock here wondering when we're going to do that, we'll finish this lab. lab number two and then we'll take our first break of the day.

We're really probably just resting for the day, so we're going to go ahead and continue with this lab, so exercise number two within this lab is we just want to interact with this and show how the bot works, so there are several pre-built themes that have been created for us and you can see that you have the ability to test these themes at the bottom left, so look at the bottom left. I'll see this option here where you can test your bot, so if I click on test your bot down here, this will expand the test screen for me and another key thing that I highly recommend you do when you're testing your bot is to activate this option here called tracking between topics.

What that will do is it will actually show you the conversation tree that you are running the test through, so it will show you a tree of a conversation and it will show you the path that your users took, so if we wanted to test this, we would turn on cross-bot tracking or cross-topic tracking, sorry, and then we can go down to the bottom where it says type a message and we can just type something like hello. If you type hello and press enter or send, that will allow you to interact with your chatbot and because we have this track between topics enabled, you can see on the right side the conversation tree and the path we took.

So because we said hello, you hit one of the trigger phrases right here. This is a system topic because of the way you hit this trigger phrase and then it started a message that says Hello, I'm a virtual agent and then it goes through the interaction you would have with that particular topic here, so it's asking how you can help us and, if you wanted, you could ask something more specific. It could say something like stores near me and if I want to know information about where it is. local stores that are near me, if I am looking for a physical physical store, I can go to the stores or type stores nearby and press send and this will change to a completely different topic this time the topic is called lesson two a simple topic with conditions and variables and you can see that you came to this trigger phrase that started this topic, so one of the interesting things here is the power of virtual agents that can jump between multiple topics, so if you start with hello, it will start a topic of the system. but then if I say something like stores near me it will start a user topic.

In this case, it's a user-predesigned theme that allows me to transition to learning more about where to find my stores and now that I've done it. which you will see here inside the chatbot, it says: "I will be happy to help you find a store near you, what location you are interested in and you will see that there are several predefined themes here that we can choose from and you can actually click on any of the topics or should you say which of the stores near you you want to try, so if I were to select something like Redmond or Seattle, whatever, if I select one of them, it will give me More information about that particular store and. you can see with the track between topics on, it will show you the method of how it got to where it is and if I say, you answered my question, yes, it will delete me this condition path on the left side now it's a lot of steps, there's a lot going on here. on the right and all of this has been pre-designed for you, so let's take some time now and we'll show you how you can get started with this yourself right now, all I'm doing is showing you things that have already been pre-designed for us.

These are some user themes that were defined for us ahead of time, but now let's switch gears a little bit and actually show it to you. how you can play with the interface with inner power virtual agents and modify an existing theme or even how you could create your own eventually, so let's come back here, so what I want to do is for you to follow me. and go to the section here that says themes okay so we'll go ahead and go to the themes node on the left side here and inside the themes area we'll make a copy of an existing theme that we already have so you'll find there's a list of user-defined themes right here.

There is also a list of system topics. These user-defined themes are back. They are placed here to help you learn how to use Power Virtual. agents, they are not the ones I actually made myself. Virtual Agents put this here so you can learn how to use the tool. A great way to learn how to use the tool is to play with these, so if you wanted to. Learn how to use powerful virtual agents. You could make a copy of one of these, for example find lesson number two, a simple topic with a condition and a variable, don't actually click on it, but hover over it and then click on more actions and with more action selected, go ahead and select that you want to make a copy of this theme, okay, so all we're going to do is make a copy and then we'll make it our own, so go ahead and select make a copy and when you do that, It will take a few moments, so you will see that it is copying the theme at the top.

It actually has a little status bar to tell you how things are going, but you created the theme and now you can see us. have two of them here called lesson two, okay and you can hover over it. If you hover over it, you can see which one is the copy that will tell you to copy to the end of the text when you hover over it. but you can also tell which copy is because copy will be disabled by default and you can go ahead and leave it disabled for now. We'll change it a little later, once we start working with her. a little bit more, okay, so this is what I want you to do.

I want you to select the one we just made a copy of, which would be this one here at the top that is disabled. Go ahead and select it. Press the text. and when you select the text for the theme um it will take you to the theme settings so at the top of the theme settings screen here you can change the name of the theme if you want so that will actually be our first step. to rename this topic, where it says name here at the top left, go ahead and rename this and let's call it something like git store locations instead of lesson two and then you'll also see things like a description, the descriptions They are also quite useful.

I recommend that you use descriptions when trying to define what this theme will do, especially if you are not going to be the only one working on the solution. It's really helpful to provide detailed descriptions of what this theme shows and what it's doing that way, if someone else picks up what you did or edits things you've already worked on, that way they'll know exactly what this theme is doing, so I recommend it without a doubt. adding a description the other thing you'll find here are trigger phrases and we've already talked a little bit about trigger phrases but you'll notice that it recommends having at least five to ten diverse phrases when you say diverse phrases that means don't have a ton of phrases that are basically the same thing, just slightly rephrased, you should have different phrases that still address the same topic or you would like to address the same topic but are different enough to drive virtual agents.

They won't get confused about which one to use even though they're going to the same topic in this case, so you'll see how to create trigger phrases later, but you'll notice that this one already has several trigger phrases. phrases pre-created for us and what this means is that if a user types something like stores near me or store locations, it will find one of these trigger phrases to start the conversation based on the similarity of what the user typed to the real trigger. phrases, so you don't have to type this exactly, but you have to type something similar to what you see in the trigger phrases for this topic to start, so after changing the name, let's go ahead and save this topic. you can find the ability to save the theme at the top right here, so go ahead and click save theme once you've changed the name and then we'll go ahead and launch the creation canvas and so you can look, you'll find the author button and canvas right here, so go ahead and select the creation canvas to start it again.

Just a reminder that I know there will be a lot of clicking here, so if you ever needpossibility to interact with your virtual agent from within. side of this little demo site so you can share this site with your colleagues and then they can come in and start interacting with it and that same interaction that you had a few moments ago now you have within this demo site and I can say stores near me and it will produce the same interaction that we had before, but now with this nice little demo site that you can hand out to people, that is the purpose of the demo site just to test, this is not something that you will necessarily send. your users wouldn't send them to the demo site here, I would do some integration with various channels which we'll talk about later, but let's go ahead and take a short break again, we have a pretty full day so we're going to take a very short break. , long enough to give them a little biological break here.

We'll take a five-minute break and then we'll come back and move on to module three. Okay, so I'll see you in five minutes, make sure you can hear me too. Okay, welcome everyone, so I know there's a lot going on here at once to get to know Power Virtual Agent. I saw some comments on the live stream about the kind of understanding. the business problem a little bit more, I know I'm going more through the how to function less about the why, so let's step back here for a moment and talk about that before we do that, um, I do want to let you know a little about pragmatic work, so you may be new to pragmatic work and may not be as familiar with what we do.

We do a lot of power platform, Azure SQL server, all kinds of bi training, so I want to fill in a little bit on what we offer, so if you'll bear with me for a moment, to bother you with that, we do a lot of live trainings where, in fact, we previously came to the site and obviously we would do more. virtual now, we do things from one day workshops to week long boot camps, we also have on demand learning which has 60 different courses built in, those 60 courses have azure power platform power bi power automates power applications and even a class the one you're sitting in now is also recorded there in its entirety, so if for some reason we can't finish today and do everything today, you can capture the recorded version of this class, the pre-recorded version that covers everything, uh. in our on-demand learning and we actually have that on-demand learning for the panel in a daily app in a day and powerful virtual agents in a day are free forever, so you see, I'll show you where you can sign up.

Sign up and try it here in a few moments and Matt will probably share it in the chat with you too, but that's free forever so you can explore those three classes, a daily app dashboard in a day, and power up virtual agents . on a day we also have classes for purchase so if you are interested in checking out any of our additional trainings that are more in depth than our free training you can certainly check them out as well and finally the last piece here is our hackathons. Our hackathons are really designed to allow you to take what you learn in one of our training classes and apply it to your data, so if you're really interested in learning more about virtual power agents but want to apply it to your scenarios and your business, we can do it through a hackathon or if you're interested in learning more about power bi or power apps and how can I do it within our ecosystem, that's what hackathons are designed for, it's one part training and one part learning how.

Building it in our prototype is kind of the end result of that, so it's not for production use, but to build prototypes so you can eventually take something to production. Our goal is to teach man to fish. you know how to fish and do it yourself. The last thing we do is we also offer tutoring. I don't have it on the slide here, but if you're interested in one-on-one tutoring, we can certainly help you. that too and this is a big list of just some of the classes, it's not even all 60 courses, but this gives you a little idea of ​​the type of courses we offer.

What I'd like to do is walk you through briefly here where you can find and you might want to pause the video to get this link and Matt will probably share it in the chat as well, but this link I have on the screen. This is where you can sign up for a trial of our on-demand learning. Now when you sign up for a trial, you'll notice it will say a seven-day free trial, which is seven days for our paid training, but powerful virtual agents. The class is free forever and never expires. You can log in two years from now and still watch it.

In fact, we even update the course periodically to make sure that you're seeing the most up-to-date version of not only the class but also the technology, so if you go to this link that I have on the screen right now, you can pause the video and capture it, and Matt will post it in the chat for you as well when you go to that link, it will be a quick form here for you to give us a little information about yourself, but you will notice here that no credit card is required, there are 60 classes available for seven days, but then you have lifetime access to the dashboard, a daily app, and daily virtual agents during the day, so fill out the form that will give you access to those long-term classes forever.

It is a great opportunity for you and it will help you. more in depth on not just virtual power brokers but also some of the other power platform technologies alright the other thing I wanted to mention and you will receive a link to this via email if you registered for our event in advance, but the last thing I want to mention before we start again is the cookbook, so you have a link here and this has also been posted in the live chat several times, but the cookbook is what allows you creating a use case for virtual agents in general or creating a use case for chatbots in general with your organization, so if you're trying to make that use case for your business, why do we need this?

The chatbot cookbook is a great method to understand that, if you do, you will also receive this email, so you won't necessarily have to worry about receiving it right away. We'll email it to you if you signed up for the event, but if you're not seeing this later? Check out this link and there's a short form for that as well, but once you fill it out, it will allow you to have this great cookbook that we created, it's about 15 pages long. talks about the benefits and use cases of chat bots and how you could use them in your environments as well.

Well, speaking of how you would use your environment environment, let's talk a little more about the business case. From what we've done so far, a lot of what we've done has been picking up and picking up where we left off on other pre-existing themes, so the use case here is that I'm a customer. I'm going to embed this on my website or from a business perspective, I'm going to embed this on my website so that customers can visit my website or pragmatic works, let's say hardware and we sell physical devices like phones like this. and we sell other laptops and things like that and we want that when our customers have a situation where they need to ask a question, we don't overwhelm our live chat, we don't overwhelm our customer service representatives with with dozens and dozens of chats, a Chatbot can often solve many of those problems for our users and that's why when our customers come to our website, we want to give them the ability to interact with our powerful virtual agent who has a lot of the answers are predefined and, again, for the enterprise scenario, I could ask someone who is part of my customer service department to define the flow in the conversation tree we were looking at earlier and of course it will require some training if you just hand it over.

I tell this to someone within their customer service department. I'd rather feel a little overwhelmed at first, but it's really designed for them. Everything is based on a graphical user interface. You will see that I have not written any code and it allows you to be able to define. Because they are the subject matter experts, how the conversation will flow, that's one of the big benefits here with powerful virtual agents over other bots, this allows you to hold your court, your subject matter experts are the ones that really define What will the conversation be like? it's going to flow because they are the experts on how they would answer this as a customer service representative to begin with, so this would appear on my website and allow my users to ask things like "do you know what happens if I need to return a product What if I need to find the nearest store and we would develop these themes to be able to engage with those interactions that our customers have?

Okay, so I hope that helps establish the business case a little better than I had done well. earlier, so we'll go back to our slides for a few moments and start with module three, which is where we're going. This is actually pretty quick. We'll be looking at creating bots from existing pages. actually a really fun part of Power Virtual Agents because what this will allow you to do is point to a website that already has a ton of key information, like an FAQ page, often. asked questions page and being able to direct powerful virtual agents to that FAQ page and it automatically creates several suggested topics for you based on that page and this one is pretty quick to show up, but it's a lot of fun, so let's go ahead and really Let's get a little more information on this, so if we want to use this option to create suggested topics, all you simply have to do is direct the virtual agents to a web page, it must be a secure page, which means that It must be an https page.

You should have that assurance and with just one click it will create multiple themes for you and you will be able to choose which themes make sense for you; In some cases, it may be a topic that isn't relevant because it's kind of scanning the page and trying to detect what things are potentially relevant to a conversation that your clients are going to have, so we won't cover a lot of slides, although we will. straight to creating a new theme based on a web page now, if you are following this, it is now a theme suggestion from module 3 and this will be very quick, it is actually not a very deep module because it does a lot of the work for you , but you want to do it.

I'm sure you have topic suggestions from lab number three open for this example. Okay, I'm going to open it up on my screen here as well, so I'm going to follow you, so this is what we're going to do. To start, start the Open Power virtual agents again, so I'm going to go back to my web browser like this and it looks like oh, here we go, I already have it open, let's go to the one on the right here, okay, so we're done publishing. In our virtual agent that we had created before, now we are going to make some additional improvements and create some new themes, so we are going to go up to the themes where we were previously, so select themes here again, okay, and with the internal themes, We're going to create some suggested topics, so you'll find them at the top left, right next to where you would normally create a new topic.

You can now create a suggested topic, so go ahead and select suggest topics. Now, when you do this, ask them to provide a web page where the suggested topics can be found. This can be a FAQ page which is a very common use case. In fact, the labs, if you follow the labs on page number two, they have a link here to an FAQ page that you can use for this example, so if you could go ahead and paste this into the chat so people can copy and paste it in case you don't have it in your chat, sorry if you don't.

I don't have the labs open, but what I'm going to do is go ahead and open this page and this is what it looks like, so this is an FAQ page that looks a lot like an FAQ page. FAQ page that you would find on any company's website, but what we're going to do is leverage, view, and basically steal this page to create a bunch of themes for us automatically, so I'm going to Copy this URL and paste it here where it says link to online content. We'll just paste this from the labs again. This will only work if you have an https website so make sure it's some sort of secure site before you try to do this okay so we'll go ahead and hit add and you could add multiple sites here if you want so you can have several links here that I provided to be able to send to Turn on virtual agents, so we'll go ahead andwe'll hit Start once you have that URL plugged in here after you click Add and when you hit Start, it'll spend a few moments here analyzing that site to create multiple suggestions for us.

So it might take a few minutes here, but once it's complete, you'll be able to take a look at the suggestions that have already been created for you, so we'll wait a few moments here for it to complete once it's completed. You'll see that the suggestions will have a series of suggestions that we can see, so you'll see that there are two different tabs. You can choose these are the existing themes that we're already using and then the suggestions are on the right side. side that you'll be able to use and select once I'm done getting your suggestion, so I'm waiting for it to end up here once it's done up we'll be able to take a look at it, okay? like it's done, you've given us eight new suggestions, okay, so let's take a look at those suggestions.

If you click suggested here on the right side, you'll get a list of all the suggestions that are available to you and you'll be able to pick and choose which ones you want and which ones you don't. You can delete suggestions that you don't think make sense. In fact, you can add some suggested questions to make them legitimate topics, so these are just suggestions for now, but if you want. make them come true, then I would select and not do this yet, but I would select add to existing themes to add this suggested theme to make it real now.

If there is anyone here who doesn't think it's helpful, feel free to enter. where it says locate a store, but we already have a topic for locating a store, so if we don't want this one, we can delete it by pressing the little delete button and you can go ahead and click delete next to it to locate. a store below the suggested themes and once you do that, you should quickly go ahead and delete that theme now if there are others that we want, let's say for example we want to reset the password at the top and we want to use that password reset. and we want to make it an actual theme, you can do a couple of things and you can see it, so if I hit reset your password here under the suggested themes, you can get a little preview of what this theme would look like, so by default this is By the way, this is not interactive here, this is just a little preview so you can see it, but as you look at it here you can see that you can have a trigger phrase right now again, it is suggested that you have five to ten trigger phrases, but this at least gives you a small glimpse of what is available to you.

You can see what is the message that will be sent to your user if they start this particular topic and then if you really like it. and you want to add this theme, you can go ahead and press add to themes. You can also delete it or you can press add to topics and then start editing it immediately. In our case, we'll go ahead and hit add to topics. This blue button here is almost a green button here to go ahead and add this to our suggested topics, take it out of our suggested topics and make it an actual topic, so go ahead and hit add to topics which will take a few moments and you'll take it. from the suggested section and will move it to the existing section, so now you'll see six, six suggested topics left and I'm up to 14 existing topics.

If I change the existing themes here, you'll see that that new reset your password theme has now been added and what this does is it now allows my user to come into my chat and try to log into your portal, let's say they buy something and he forgot his password because he doesn't buy things. from us on a regular basis, they can now log into our virtual proxy agent or they can interact with our agent and when they interact with our agent, if they type something like reset their password or if they use the word password, they will.

You'll likely pick up on this topic and help them interact and figure out how they can reset their password now. Every time you use a suggested theme, it will automatically leave that new suggested theme disabled, so you'll see that the suggestion here is disabled, so if you want to use that new suggestion, make sure you go ahead and turn it on, so go ahead and click her and you will notice that it will take a few moments to activate that theme once you have We're done with module three, which is quite short, so what we learned in this one was how we can use and leverage existing web pages to be able to create pre-designed themes for we, so In this case, we look at an FAQ page, we use that FAQ page to create eight different topics for ourselves and then we can choose which of those suggested topics we really like and want to use such a quick module here. but at least it gives you an idea of ​​how you can do that little interaction to initiate and create topics.

Okay, let's go back to our slides for a moment and what we're going to transition to now is what I would talk about. let's say a little bit more advanced topics what this topic will focus on is how you can really improve or refine your chatbot with variables with root topic redirects and with entities, so we'll look at a few different things here. We'll also talk about a feature called gap filling and we'll discuss what gap filling is and how it can be useful to you and how you can actually optimize your chatbot to take advantage of gap filling, so there are a couple of key terms what we're going to get out of this module, okay, as far as our schedule goes, we're moving forward here, uh, and we.

We will return to see how we can create chatbots that are more intelligent and that take advantage of the variables that allow it. The purpose of the variables here is to allow me to pass a value from one part of an interaction to a later part of an interaction, so Say, for example, I'm having a conversation with a customer and they tell me that they would like a refund in your Samsung Series 7 device. If it says Samsung Series 7, I want to capture it and store it in a variable so I can use it that way. later in the conversation, so that's the point of variables here is to store information and then use that information later, so you'll see that we're actually going to get quite a bit of use out of variables in the next set of demos.

Alright, this slide is really just repeating what we just talked about. Variables allow us to retain and store information and pass it to later parts of our interaction and then fill in the gaps. I mentioned gap filling, but haven't discussed it. however, gap filling can be considered mad libs. I'm not sure how many of you played with mad libs when you were kids where you had this story and there were a bunch of blanks and it had adjectives and nouns and things like it had blanks that you had to fill in, that's basically what is fill in blanks, you have blanks and you need to complete and connect phrases or words in those blanks with information that is provided within the chat conversation, so what fill in blanks?

Which means that I have blank spaces or variables that I need to fill in so that many times those spaces can be used and leveraged as variables and I want to connect information to those variables. Well, we'll also see how you can skip the gap filling. In some cases and how you can skip questions based on the interactions that you have, we'll discuss that a little bit later, but there's this kind of proactive gap filling concept where you have these variables that need to be filled in, but rather instead of ask a question, if your user gives you more information than you need, can I take that extra information and plug it into various variables or slots later so that it's kind of a proactive gap filling that we'll learn about a little later ? so we're also going to learn about how to redirect topics, so the idea of ​​redirecting topics is that you're not going to create a topic that covers every interaction that you have, you're not going to create a topic that takes care of everything. that your business needs to do, you're going to create several small themes for a couple of reasons, one of which makes it easier for you to maintain, so if you need to go in and edit a theme, you're not going to be looking at this big creation canvas. it's so big that it's hard for you to interact with it, but you're also creating multiple topics so they're more segmented and easier to interact with and you can redirect them so you can have a conversation about lawn maintenance, but then redirect very quickly to a conversation or a topic about how to reset your password and all of that can be done within the same chat interaction, but based just on the conversation that's happening within the conversation tree, you'll be able to redirect those conversations pretty easily, so let's go to learn how you can manage and redirect topics, so let's move on to the next one here so the next one is a little bit longer, not as short as the last one, but this might be one of the most important ones in the class. here, so it's pretty deep, it's good to get comfortable with it, so if you need again just a reminder, this is on YouTube live, so if you need to rewind, watch something a second time if I'm going too fast. an item for you, go ahead, rewind a little bit and watch it a second time, take your time reading this one, these will be some of the most important details, um, although it's a little more advanced than what we've done so far.

It's pretty critical for you, so this one will be inside lab number four. Okay, while you're looking at your class files, you're going to open up lab number four, which is improving your chatbot with variable entities and me. I think the last piece is with topic redirects, so if you look at lab number four, the setting here is actually set up for you and I recommend that you read some of the first few paragraphs within the labs because they set the stage pretty well for you here. so i mentioned that filling in spaces is kind of like the concept of mad libs, if you've ever done that as a kid or maybe even recently with your own kids, i have some little ones, that's why i definitely remember mad libs, it's the idea of take values ​​and fill spaces or fill blanks and those spaces in this case are often considered variables where I want to fill in some kind of value inside of them and you have this idea that you can even proactively extract information from that Maybe You get information sooner than you expected and you can store that information earlier and pass it on and fill in gaps later so you can even skip the questions you would normally ask.

We will have an experience of that a little later. but part of the prologue here for the lab is definitely worth reading because it gives you a good overview of this concept of not only gap filling but also proactive gap filling. Okay, so in this lab what we're going to do is we're going to leverage some variables and capture things like product information, store locations, even some personal data that we want to collect and store within some variables, so we'll get to a point. in which We are going to create a new topic that will focus on a customer requesting to return a product.

Okay, so customers, the bottom line here is that I have a product that doesn't work. I want to return it, so that's your business case here. and our customers' first interaction with us is that they take advantage of our powerful chatbot or virtual agent to be able to determine how they can return a product, so that's the goal of this and what we're going to do through this is Actually, let's To create this theme from scratch, we're not going to copy one like we did before and in fact we're going to create multiple nodes here so we can handle this interaction.

Okay, so first things first. I'm going to go back to my web browser and we're going to create a new topic, so with the inner power virtual agents that we're still looking at and I never left it, you're going to make sure to look at the topics. page here, okay, so make sure you're still seeing topics that you shouldn't have left, but in case you go ahead and go back to topics and within topics, let's flip and click on a new topic so this time we're going to start a theme from scratch, so once you select a new theme, we'll tell you how we want to name the theme, so we want to name this theme, return items, so go ahead and give it a name, return items, okay and I do it, I won't do it because of time here.

I'm not going to give you a description, but when you do this in real life here you definitely want to provide a pretty complete description, so in case someone comes here after you and sees this, they know exactly what this theme is designed for, so The next thing we'll do is create some trigger phrases that we'll start with. one, but again, we should add five to ten trigger phrases to make this theme really effective, but the only trigger phrase we're going to add is I want to return a product and we'll add that trigger phrase here, okay?

You can see that a trigger phrase has been added. You can eliminate trigger phrases.You can add more trigger phrases again. It is recommended that you have five to ten trigger phrases. Once you've done that, go ahead and save this topic, so save your work early and often. I'm going to go ahead and hit save at the top right and that's going to take a moment here to save our theme once it does, we're ready to go when you get an error here, let's see oh the air, I know what the air is. For um the error is because we have a blank message so don't worry too much about that let me go back so you can see the same thing that I'm seeing if you see an error that's okay we're about to fix the error. here in a moment I just realized that and you can click on the errors and see where they go, don't worry about clicking on that because anyway we're about to go to the same place where I want you to click is go to creation canvas button right above the air, in fact if you click on a bug it will take you to the exact same place so either way is fine but go ahead and click go to creation canvas and When you do, the author will start. on canvas, which is the same thing we've seen before, which has at the top whatever trigger phrase you have now, we only have one and then what we're going to do is add a message, so the message here which, by the way, you can copy and paste from the labs if you're looking at the labs, this is on page four of the labs, the phrase we're going to use here is sorry to know that you're with you.

I'm not happy with your purchase, so I'll go ahead and write it here. I can help you with that. I'll help you with that. Okay, we got our first message which comes back below. We want to add a question, so we are. We simply greet the user by telling him that we are sorry that he is not satisfied with his product. The next thing we're going to do is add a question, so you're going to click on the little Add Node button under the message okay, so you're going to click on the little plus sign here and we're going to ask a question, so go ahead and select ask a question here and that will add a new question node, what is the question we are going to ask?

We will ask them what the purchase price was because this is what we are investigating in our company. I'm making up a rule here just to show you different scenarios of what you could do with the internal virtual power. agents, but this is the rule for our company within our company, if we have a company whose product sells for more than two thousand dollars, then they must return it to the store. You know, this is just a made up rule because I'm making up a rule so I can show you how you can meet some conditions and things like that here if our product has sold for less than two thousand dollars then you can send it, you can send it back to us, you can send it back by mail For us, okay, part of it, maybe you could turn that made-up rule into something real, maybe it's that we don't want to have to buy shipping insurance for something that costs more than two thousand dollars, so if we need know it. the price of the product they purchased to give them better instructions, then in our question we will ask what was the purchase price of the item you want to return.

Okay, so we'll ask you that question. You will see that there are a few formatting options. that you have here, you can add links, you can add a bulleted list, a numbered list, italic, italic, italic and bold as well, so you can format things here if you want, so as per our return policy, We're going to return different information and we also want to validate the value that they enter, so if I ask them something like what was the purchase price of their product and they type in blue instead of a number, then obviously I want to be able to validate the type of data that they provide and that's where this identification property comes into play.

This id property takes advantage of the entities that you have within the virtual agents side of power and therefore does a couple of things, one of them will validate the values ​​that you are writing are correct, so if I ask you how much was the price of a product and they say blue instead of 50 or 50 or I put a 50 with a dollar sign, all of that would work. In fact, you can write even the word 50 as it is written, you can write fifty and that will work too because it is a number power. The virtual agent is smart enough to say, "Oh, you typed the word 50 and it redirects it as the number 50." interpret that for you, but if they type in something totally different, like the color blue, to find out how much the product was, then that's where there's a couple of validation steps for you, so in the identity property here what we're going to do doing is what we want. to make sure that they give us a number, so instead of using the multiple choice option that we had in our previous example, we're going to reverse this to search for a number, so the id here again is really designed to help promote the virtual.

Agents validate the types of values ​​they are typing, so if they type in blue for a number, it will probably prompt them to try again, so we'll use the prebuilt number property here and there. way it validates that they are typing a real number, even if they spell the number it will validate it as a number. The next thing we're going to do is get our first use of variables. and to use the variable we want to take the value that you write for this question and store it in a variable, to do that you will see this option here called save answer as and right now it has a kind of blank variable. here for us, but if you select this, you can edit the variable and it has a little popup panel on the right side and you can give it the name of the variable, you can tell it what the scope of the variable is, you can play with it a little bit and you can even use variables in multiple bots if necessary There are many things you can do with this now, in this case we will give the variable a name and call it purchase price return price, so we will call this return purchase price, OK? that is the name of the variable that we have here and then again you can define what is the scope of the variable, so now this variable has a limited scope to this theme, which means that it cannot be used in any other theme and let's leave it like that, but just so you know that you can make this variable usable in any theme within this bot side, so that's also an option, okay, once you've named it, return purchase price , go. go ahead and save, you may want to save a few times as you work on this, but go ahead and save this so it saves the work we've done so far, okay, so our variable has now been cr and has now been created next.

Now that we have the information on how much your purchase price was, we now want to redirect the next part of this conversation based on your response, so if you say that you bought something that cost over two thousand dollars, then I'm going to direct you to locate your nearest store. Remember that we already did the location of the store conversation so we can redirect that conversation to another topic or if they say, "Hey, I bought something for 200, which is less than 2000." I'm going to tell you how we can send something back, so let's go ahead and add our next node here and what we're going to do is create this condition, so it's like an if statement here, so we're going to add a new node underneath from the question right here by pressing the Add Node button and the node we are going to add is a condition node.

Okay, so when you add a condition node, this is basically a split, it's splitting our conversation in multiple ways when we select. this, then I'm going to select add a node or add a condition and if you add a condition, you will always have more than one route, it's this or that or you can add multiple routes and for our scenario We want our routes to look at the value of our variable, so we created this variable to store the information that was answered for our price question and we want to see that variable in our condition to determine how we are going to route this path. so we will say that if the variable value of the return purchase price expand this if the variable value of the return purchase price is, let's say, less than you could say less than or equal to whatever, let's say less than if it is less than two thousand dollars, so your part is down here, so we would define next what we want to happen if the purchase price is less than two thousand dollars, so this is what we would do, we would say we would add as a new message here , so we would add like a new message right here, so we would press the little plus sign to add another node and we would add a message node to tell them okay, if it's less than two thousand dollars, this is what you do, so We say show a message. and the message we want to show you is let me zoom out for a moment.

It's actually in the labs, so if you want to copy and paste it from the labs, you can do that. It's on page eight and it's this here. You can return the item or items to my email to purchase is worded a bit strangely for contoso returns and then it gives you the address, so I'm going to copy this and paste it into my message here. By the way, you can also add any type of formatting you want, so if you really wanted to have the text bold here in certain areas, you could do that, you can format it however you want to make it very clear to your users, okay, good deal, yeah really this kind of ends this part of the conversation ends this part of the condition because if the product is less than two thousand dollars we're going to tell them that they can go ahead and mail the item back right here and then if we're happy with that, if that should really end our conversation, then we can tell it that we want to add a new node to end the conversation with a poll.

Okay, let me show you that one more time, so if we're happy with this message, that should. Let this be the end of our entire conversation that has to do with products under two thousand dollars, so we could add one more end node here. Sorry, my mouse is getting a little clumsy. Let me try again, we can add a new node. to end the conversation and we want to end with a survey and this would send it to a system topic to end the survey itself, so we're going to end the conversation with a survey now for our other path, we really need to determine what we're going to do with our other condition and we can assume that if it's not less than two thousand dollars, then it's obviously more than two thousand dollars, so we don't need to define this condition because it's actually everything else and So what we're going to do is tell you and basically point them to our topic on how to find the store location that they should return the product to because again our policy is if the product is more than two. thousand dollars and they need to return it to a store, if it's less they can mail it, so if it's more than two thousand dollars, then we'll add another question here, so we'll add a new node and the question that What I'm going to ask is : Do you know the location of your nearest store?

Well, this is pretty simple. You won't expect a complex answer to this question, it's really yes or no, and when you have a yes, a no, or a true or false that's when you would use a type of bullion id oh my mouse keeps growing here we go, you would use a type boolean here just like you would in traditional databases or CDs, they all have boolean types where you can return true or false values, so the answer to this question let me add a question mark here. The answer to this question must be true or false.

Based on that, we want a broth that you can see right here. A positive or negative answer is extracted for this and the form. What this would look like to your users is that there would actually be two buttons, yes or no, just like we had in the previous example where we had the different stores and they could select Redmond, Seattle or Bellevue as the button that users go to. have an answer option button here that is yes or no so we can select whether or not they know they are near a store, okay, that's it for that one, so if they know the store, yes or no, now we want to take the answer. and store that in a variable as well, so based on whether they answer yes or no to this, we'll store it in a variable by selecting save answer as variable here and then on the top right it'll give you this new variable has a new name and the name of this variable will be the store location, okay, so if they know the store location, it will return true, if they don't know, the store location will return false, okay, so let's go .

Go ahead and give that variable a name. I would recommend going ahead and saving while you're at it, so go ahead and hit save at the top right. I should save more often than now just to make sure everything gets saved. here, but you see here, now he will ask the questionthen we can leverage some of the other skills we learned about topic redirects to be able to integrate this properly, so that once this entity saves, it will appear to have been saved. We are going now. to move on to the themes, let's go ahead and close this entity first, so at the bottom right go ahead and close this right and then we'll go to the top left to find the right themes and we'll create a new theme called options shipping, so create a new topic here and this new topic will be called shipping options.

Okay, so, as we mentioned before, it's best to add five to ten different phrases. This time we will add several phrases and instead of just one like. We did it last time we'll say what my shipping options are we'll say can I have it again what do you remember what trigger phrases are? These are the ones that will start this topic, so you need to ask something similar to one of these phrases for this. The topic will be started, so I'll say: Can I have free in-store pickup? Ok, let's also add Can I get free shipping?

Ok, let's also add Do you provide same day shipping and then one last question about how much is shipping? It's very important to have, but it's built into multiple trigger phrases that your users could type over and over again as a reminder. Trigger phrases don't have to be perfect if they write something like, you know, free in-store pickup, you'll recognize it. They use part of a trigger phrase that exists here and activate and start starting this topic to make sure it's leveraged and used correctly, so once you've added those trigger phrases, we'll go ahead and hit save at the top.

Okay, so make sure you save before you continue and then once the save is complete, launch the creation canvas, so you'll click go to the creation canvas right here once you've created those Twitter quotes and press save. So if you're following along with the labs, now we're going to task number three on page 20, yes, page 20. And what we're going to do is, first, we want to add some kind of message, so every time this starts topic, we want to give you a message that you will find on page 20 in the laboratories and that the message that we will place here is that we provide different shipping options to help you get your order as quickly as possible. however you want so I'm going to steal this you can take it from the lab if you want you can copy and paste it if you want I'm going to copy this from here instead of writing anything like I said you probably would It would be a good recommendation to have the labs open as you go through this class and I'll paste it here.

We provide different shipping options so you can get your order as fast as you want, so that's the first answer. to this trigger phrase we want to send you some kind of message just to acknowledge that you are engaged with the right topic here, so we are going to ask a question, so the question we want to ask you is what shipping method do you want so we will add another node here and ask a question and the question we will ask is what shipping method do you want. Well, remember that we created this entity a few moments ago and this is where we are.

We're going to take advantage of that entity because we want to provide a list of the options as if we had buttons before for Bellevue Redmond Seattle store locations. We want to have buttons for each of those options, so we want to have expedited and standard shipping. shipping and in-store pickup kind of stuff, we want them as buttons so our users can choose them, but if they type something different instead of just selecting the buttons, which they can do, I hope one of my synonyms picks up what they type and then redirect them to one of those three options anyway, okay, for the identification section this is where we will select our entity, so we will select it and change it from multiple choice options to In fact, type and search in the Top here shipping options.

Well, as you type it, you'll find that it will come back on its own here, but it will look for shipping options and then select the entity that we created. and then if you want you can tell it that you want to select options for users. Basically, you want to give them these options as checkboxes, so if you choose this, select options for users, it will allow you to decide which of these. options that you want to display so you can leverage an entity for multiple use cases, so the idea here with the entity is that you could select it and maybe that entity will be leveraged across multiple themes, so you could check certain values ​​of elements of the list here if I want to be used in this question and then use the same entity in another question and then not select all the options if I wanted to, for that it's fine, so in this one I want to go ahead and use each of these, so I'm going to go ahead and check each of these entity list item values ​​to leverage them as part of this question and you can see here that they will appear as buttons for our users to select, okay, so off you go. to show up to our users as select buttons, but I want to take the result of their selection and store it in a variable, so I'm going to select the variable option right here and take the result of whatever they type here as a value of the variable, like this let's go ahead and select the save response as variable and then at the top right we'll rename this variable and rename it to send method, so go up to the top right and rename this variable to method of shipping. and then as usual, I'll go ahead and recommend that you save quite often since we're already at the top right.

Let's go ahead and hit save here to make sure this conversation tree has been saved for what we've done. So far so good, once we receive a response, we now need to determine how we want to direct that response, whether we're going to respond differently depending on which shipping option they select, probably in that case, if we're going to respond differently. then we need to create a condition, so in this scenario we'll go ahead and add a condition node right after our question, so we'll add a condition after the question node that we have and we'll actually have multiple paths that this condition can take , so we'll start with this one first for now, but you can add multiple conditions here, so eventually you'll need to add several.

What it's going to do to add multiple conditions, you can go ahead and Do one more here with me you're going to go up to where it says add node and then add another condition node and it's basically going to spit it out three ways instead of just the two ways we had a moment, okay, that's what it's going to do whenever you need to have multiple conditions and we'll eventually need to add a third one here as well, but for now let's go ahead and work with expedited shipping and then store pickup and then we'll work on what We could, we could almost assume that the last condition is all the others or we might want to have a specific condition for our final option.

Our final option is standard shipping. So under the conditions, we will take advantage of the send method variable and select the variable called here. shipping method and we're going to say when the shipping method is equal to this time when it's equal to expedited shipping then we want to go this way when the shipping method is equal to store pickup then we want to go this way and then again you can choose whether or not it makes sense to add another node here to handle standard shipping. I think it makes sense because you don't want to assume that they're going to click on buttons that might actually type in a different value than what you have as buttons listed, so in that scenario you'll want to add a fourth option here, so let's add one more condition, okay, and in this fourth condition are actually the ones that are the third in order and this Third condition, we are going to add this as a shipping method and it will be standard shipping.

This fourth one, which we have on the right side, is if they write something that we can't interpret, so if they write uh, you know, 27 when we ask them about shipping methods, then we would like powerful virtual agents to direct them to this fourth condition which is for all the other conditions and that's where you might want to send them to a live event. agent or something like that, okay, actually we're going to go ahead and do it, so if you guys type anything other than these first three options, I want to send them and transfer them to a live agent to transfer them to a live agent here, let me go ahead and close my variables menu here to see a little better, okay, and by doing that, they basically wrote something that our age, our virtual agent can't interpret, so we want to send them to a live agent. person is fine and you can enter a message here of what you want to send to the live person so that he can give you some context as to why he is receiving this message.

Alright, for the remaining conditions we want to send some kind of message to our users and you'll definitely want to have your labs open for this, but this is the open pdf for this because we're going to copy and paste here, but we want a message. after each of these condition nodes, so we're going to add a message here, we're going to add a message here, and we're going to add a message here because we're going to have different information to provide to them depending on what they select as far as shipping method, okay, what you want to see here when you're looking at the labs that I'm going to draw, drag them here for a moment is, really, between pages. 24 and 25 I assume it starts on page 25.

You will copy this message and paste it into the message that will be sent to your users. For fast shipping, we want to send you this. For shipping to the store, we want to send them. this for standard shipping we want to send you this so you can see what we're going to end up copying and pasting here, so for expedited shipping we're going to paste this. You'll notice that the formatting isn't perfect right away. So you can fix it here. It's nice that I have some formatting capabilities built into the message nodes here, so I can tell you that I want to send this back with these bullet points.

You can even make the text bold to catch their attention. in certain areas of the text here I can bold this, oop, not paste, let's bold, here we go, uh so you can enjoy fast shipping at ten bucks bold and you can bold anything else here that you think that's relevant and I really want to get your attention so that it's okay, so that's built in here. You have the ability to do a little formatting and then to pick it up in the store, we will copy and paste back from page 25 the message that is provided in the lab.

Oh, thanks Matt. I appreciate you putting that in the chat for us, so we bold certain areas here just to draw your attention to the key elements that we really want you to see and then finally, for standard shipping, we'll go ahead and bring that in. one too, I'm trying to copy and paste it myself here, so I'll paste it here and of course you can bold certain elements of the text so that way it stands out to the end users. Alright, good deal, so We have those three messages that we're bringing, we're going to conclude this part of the conversation with a survey, so depending on what you selected, you got the information that you needed and we'll send it to you. them to a survey to make sure they are happy with the results.

It's always recommended to end with a survey so you can get those analytics and know whether or not you're getting your real eight results. your real bot is working as it should, so always end it with a survey, unless you're handing them off to a real person, ending it with a survey actually gives you back some analytics for you to review later, so I'm going to add in the bottom here end the conversation and end with a poll, okay and remember you don't have to do that multiple times, you can actually connect all three messages to the same result and so just a reminder of how we did it. before let me zoom this in for you, you're going to press the plus sign and you're going to see this little pink dot here that pink dot, you're going to drag that pink dot on top of the other dot and then it's going to merge all of this together so you don't have to do it multiple times, so same thing here with standard shipping I'll press the little dot and drag the pink dot above the end of the conversation, okay, that way you'll save yourself some time. you don't have to constantly redo the same thing over and over again here, okay, so let's try this, see how this robot will work before we do it, let's make sure we save it, if we don't save this, then all the work we've done is actually not saved. will show up, so make sure you go to the top right and go ahead and save the changes we've made so far.

We will then start testing your bot at the bottom. It remains that we have done it a coupleof times, so we're going to start the test to make sure cross-topic tracking is on and we're going to start a conversation here, here's how we're going to start this: I'm going to ask what my shipping options are. Oh, and by the way, you might want to show the variables, so let's turn on the variables here. Let's say what my shipping options are. Now you will see according to the theme we have created. Now we've created two on our own, we copied one earlier, but we've created two on our own and in this one it brings back the different options, it's leveraging the entity that we created, it's giving us the different options that we can select from. here we could select expedited shipping if we wanted to here, go ahead and select that and it will return the information for expedited shipping.

Perfect, looks great, then you can tell if the question was answered or not. Let's go ahead and say yes and then. sends us to such a good interaction survey that has here good capabilities to be able to interact with the solution that we made here, okay and at all times you could see that the variable interaction that we had was shown at the top as Okay, so let's try a more, let's go ahead and reset this conversation and start over with what my shipping options are. Okay, and then what I'd like to do this time is take a different path here and I want to show you. how synonyms work, instead of selecting one of these buttons, we have these nice buttons here that we can optionally select, but let's say my user doesn't select those options, but instead types the word fast shipping, you can do that, you can type instead instead of using it, but when they type expedited shipping it will take advantage of the synonyms that we created in that entity and we can see that it returns the same information for expedited shipping even though they didn't write that, so the synonyms here help to be able to define this correctly.

Okay, let's reboot once again, so click the Reset button at the top again. This time we're going to ask the question totally differently and I want to show you how to fill that proactive space. works, so we talked about proactive slot filling earlier in the slides. A reminder of what proactive slot filtering does. A slots setting automatically takes a value that my user has and plugs it in so my user doesn't. I have to ask a question that my user already answered, so if we were to ask if you have fast shipping, I would hope that my bot wouldn't ask the question about what type of shipping you want, it should be able to skip that part correctly.

If you've already told me you want fast shipping, let's try this again. In this case, we have deleted or restarted our bot and this time we will ask the question: do you have fast shipping? if this used that proactive gap filling then it would skip the question about what type of shipping they want and go straight to the information about expedited shipping and it did. If you look here, we asked the question: do you have fast shipping? If you look at the tracking topic on the right side, it actually skipped the question about what shipping method you want because we already answered that question within our first interaction and it went straight to providing the information for expedited shipping, that's a pretty good service .

Well, I didn't even have to ask additional questions. The powerful virtual agents here were smart enough to interpret what I was getting at and jump straight to the most pertinent information here, so really cool, capacity here, okay, so We have about 20 minutes left of our day here and there will be a few things, so just a reminder that we have pre-recorded this class with the entire entire class available to you, so we're providing that material to you if you don't. Would you mind providing the link to the form to fill out so they can have the class complete.

That would be great. I would appreciate it. What we're going to do to wrap up the last 20 minutes is talk about a little bit about some of the best practices and optimization of building your chatbot, so we have plenty of time for that. One thing I'll note here before we move away from our demo. Here's a piece that we won't have as much. It's time for that, at least I want to highlight and it has to do with Power Automate, so Power Automate and we'll talk about it through the slides, at the very least, Power Automate has a lot of interaction with the internal virtual agents of Power, so that even though we're not going to have much time to see it during our live session right now, what I would like you to do, I would love for you to do it, after our live session is over, I want you to do my lab. 5 and lab six and make sure you do it with the login that we created for you, that login that we created for you and if you remember, at the beginning of our live session, we explained how to import a solution and how to um, take that solution and import the flows from that solution and we have the power application configured.

Labs five and six really delve into that and explain how you can take advantage of power automation flows, so I'll give you an idea. of what that looks like, if you really wanted to add one of those flows that it's already set up for, you could take advantage of that by adding a let's go down, uh, let's see here, let's see here, there it is, so I was looking for the little plus sign is what I was trying to find here where it says add node. You'll see there's this option here to call an action and this is really where automated power excels, so calling an action allows you to pass variables. from your virtual power agent interaction to power automation and then once you get to power automation, that extends your capability far beyond what you can do singularly within virtual power agents, so if I click on Call to Action, I notice that I have several power automations. flows available to me that I can interact with so I can take advantage of this return an item one I can take advantage of this get order information by email you can even create flows so if you press if you click on the create a flow button it will start Power Automate for you and it will allow you to create a flow by launching it directly from within the virtual power agents, so it's a really powerful part again.

Labs Five and Six delved into that and I would highly recommend you do so. In fact, I also went over at least one of these on the recordings, so take a look at those labs after we finish our live recording the way I'd like to finish it if I walked into one of those labs that I couldn't finish. and it would feel rushed and I don't want to rush you guys so take a look at five and six then lab number nine is definitely optional. What lab number nine is is more theory or discussion about theme design and at best practices and optimizations, so I want to spend the last time we have together at least talking about some optimizations that you can do because we have enough time for that, we won't do the lab, but I recommend you look at lab9 later, okay, so let's do this.

Let's go back to our slides for a moment and what we're going to do is talk a little bit about the Power Automate integration and then we'll also talk about some optimization steps that you can do within Power Virtual Agents also okay, so let's talk, if you've never used Power Automate, what is it. We've briefly talked about Power Automate earlier in our session, about it being a workflow automation tool and therefore the purpose of this workflow automation. The tool is to make recovery tasks or tasks that are actually better suited for automation rather than having someone do them manually.

Power Automate gives you the ability to automate those types of tasks. It's a great tool, it's used a lot and it has integrations with power apps it has integrations with sharepoint it has integrations with power bi it really has integrations on hundreds of different data sources, even beyond those two tools I just mentioned, so it has many different integrations that are available to you when you are working within leveraging Power Automate, it is a very interesting tool and by the way, at Pragmatic Works we have several classes on Power Automate, we have an introductory class on Power Automate that we just updated and we have an advanced Power Automate course that we'll actually have updated by early next week, so we even have some classes that cover the entire power platform and how all of these elements work together now for Power Automate.

If it's new to you, it's really designed for this purpose of connecting to data sources. uh, create automations or create flows and then you can create or edit those flows from your web browser or you can also do it from your mobile device so you can work on creating power automation flows right from your mobile device, uh, very easily. a powerful automation application that allows you to create and edit flows, it can even incorporate things like approvals, so if I want to do it before integrating or before adding certain amounts of rows in a data source or before adding a record to a set of data, I can have an approval process that says yes or no, that's fine and I can have that approval process sent to groups of users or to a user who actually approves the insertion of that individual road that comes in or what you want.

You can actually make the approvals not necessarily tied to data, but you can also do it through other elements, okay, so the power is really powerfully automated for each of these different types of integrations and it has hundreds of pre-built and pre-built templates to allow you to plug in and use different scenarios that other people have come up with, so if you're not really sure how power automate can work for you, take a look at some of the templates that are available with inside power automate and it will give you a good idea of ​​what you can do, there are hundreds of them, probably bordering on thousands of them now that you can leverage and use, and they are constantly adding new data connectors so you can We can do more with Power Automate, so we've talked about data connectors.

There are tons of them available, but even if there is a data connection you want that is not listed, you can create your own custom data connectors and you can connect to the data found in the file. cloud, you can connect to data that is on-premises, so if you have data that is not yet in the cloud, that's okay, you can still use that data with the power inside to automate by leveraging something called a data gateway and The purpose of the data gateway is to connect. or connect your non-cloud data to a cloud service like Power Automate, that's fine, so if you ever need to interconnect non-cloud data to the cloud, the data gateway is the way to do so and that same data gateway is used in other power platform tools like power apps and power bi, okay, so the key thing to know here is that the power platform as a whole is It integrates very smoothly with the data connectors you have in the power automation. transfer to energy applications as well as energy virtual agents, because you have the ability to connect energy automation to your energy virtual agents, you really have a great ability to expand what you can do and that's really the purpose of this power.

Automating integration into virtual power agents is expanding the capacity of what virtual power agents can do and making it more practical to be able to get something from your users that they need and not just be able to give them a yes or no answer or give them a response. , but also act on it and do something with it, for example, you can make it so that if I receive a complaint about a product, I send a team message to someone on my product team so they can see it immediately. information about what are the complaints that are sent to our users, so there's a really cool integration that you have there, so the integration that we've talked about with our chatbots is huge, you can also have services based on location, so automation provides power. you have the ability to actually determine if someone is in a particular location, you can detect where that person is and give them information specific to their location, you can do things like built-in two-factor authentications, you can also do things like make appointments for users and actually send those appointments directly to a calendar and you can even integrate them with the AI ​​capabilities that Power Automate has, so if you want to scan like an image of a receipt and extract the data from that image, you can do that.Power Virtual Agent is extremely powerful and that's why I recommend, of course, following up with a more in-depth class on Power Automate specifically so you can dive a little deeper into it, so we'll jump into lab number two. a little bit more about other next steps, touching on some more advanced topics here as we begin to wrap up in our last 10 minutes.

Authentication is definitely a more advanced topic, but the idea of ​​authentication here is to give your chatbot the ability to authenticate to third parties. parties, so we're mainly going to talk about this. I'll go through and show you where you can learn more about this, but I at least want to tell you how you can set up something like this, so I gave you the example. today from maybe a chatbot that has been integrated into Microsoft Teams, but within that chatbot that is in Microsoft Teams I wanted to be able to connect and authenticate to salesforce.com so you can do that, you can set up an authentication from within your chatbot, so it prompts the user to enter their username and password, authenticates to that third party, and then returns information from that third party's API, so some really cool capabilities for authenticating to those APIs from third parties and then provide them all within the side that's the chatbot, your user never has to leave the chatbot to be able to authenticate to those third parties, so I think we've really said it, and what I just said, basically I already talked about most of this, but it allows You are within your conversation tree to have steps where you can inject authentication.

You can add this, basically calling an action very similar to what we did with Power Automate. You can also call an action for an authentication from another third party and again, this gives you the ability to take advantage of that third party's API capabilities. Really one key thing here is that it does this here for all the standard oauth 2 capabilities, so if you're familiar with working with oauth 2 then it holds. that same kind of wheelhouse at that point can also leverage your blue active directory, so you have the ability to tie into that and make authentication to these third parties a little bit easier, so what I'd like to show you very briefly Before Moving on to third party or agent transfer, is how and where you would need to go to learn more about authentication, so if you are interested in setting up third party authentication, that is something that would be done in the administration section on the side. left, so if you look on the left side you will find manage with internal power virtual agents and then you will also find correct authentication, so if I select authentication this is where you can see I'm probably not going to spend a lot of time because there are a lot of data points to fill out , but if you are really interested in learning how to do this third-party authentication, I would recommend that you learn more, sorry, read this.

The section here says to learn more about configuring authentication and this will have a lot of detail about what you would connect at each of these different points within the authentication configuration section here, so this is where you will connect things like your tokens to your Third party API, your client IDs, this is likely. I mentioned that powerful virtual agents are about allowing your citizen developer or your subject matter expert to create these conversations and this is probably not for the citizen developer. This is where it's starting. to get into how do I set up third party authentication, that's more for your developer to come in and start helping you, okay, so it's not necessarily going to be a citizen developer or a subject matter expert on how your business works. connecting things like authentication to a secret key and token authentication that kind of thing, but I think it's important that you know where it is so that you know how that authentication can be set up once the authentication is set up, that's how you would use it. with the inside of a theme, so let's go ahead and look at a theme here for a moment.

You don't need to follow me on this guys, just look, but with the inside of a theme in the same place that we added in the powerapps flow integration here. it goes in the same place we added in the action to go to a flow. You will also see a step here for authentication. Now I haven't set up authentication, so when this comes up, you won't see an option to authenticate to a third party, but if I had set up authentication to a third party, you would see another section here that is specific to authentication, so I just want to show the less where that integration would occur if I did it within the power side virtual agents okay, let's come back here yes, no one believes this is live, but you have a shout out to Brian Lee, okay, no one believes I'm live.

Wow, okay, so shout out to Brian Lee that's what you said, okay. this is real, this is real life, this is, uh, thanks brian lee for coming, hopefully i'm actually here and not just a shout out to someone else, okay, so, um, the last piece here that we're going to do It is not the last piece. but the last pieces here that we're going to talk about is the transfer to a support agent, so powerful virtual agents have the ability to transfer to a real person and that's what the support agents part is about here, It works best when you're integrating with Dynamics, so if you're using Dynamics, Dynamics uses a feature called omnichannel which is kind of a chat integration, its kind of service desk capabilities when you integrate with Dynamics, it's Microsoft, so Obviously they do that integration. really smooth and easy if you're not using Microsoft and you're not using dynamics for a live chat to talk to a live person, then there are capabilities and integrations for those other platforms that just don't make it as smooth and easy.

It's easy, for our company, for example, we use a different type of live chat tool, so we would have to integrate using another method and I will also show you where that is, so in this section we will talk a little more about omnichannel. omnichannel is a good tool with internal Dynamics 365 to be able to integrate with a live, in-person customer service representative for uh, so this continues to talk a little bit about omnichannel. I'm not going to go too deep. omnichannel is definitely a bit of a tangent topic here, so let me show you where you would set up the integration with a live person, so if you wanted to transfer this to a live person, there's a little bit of setup you need to do.

First you will find that setting in the top right corner so if you click on the settings icon here you will see that there is an option called transfer to agent and you can see this part, don't click with me on this I'm just showing you this because we have left five minutes or less, so just watch, but if you click transfer to agent, this is where you'll connect, whether you're using dynamic omnichannel or not, which is the dynamic version of this type of live transfer to a live human agent or if you bring your own engagement center, your own service center, some companies call it, I would select this so you can set up the integration with your own live chat that you've chosen to use, so this is where you would go to set up the settings and connect it, but once you have it connected, you will use things like the transfer to agent option here and then you will also use that. when it comes to the escalation node, to show you where it is, there's a system topic here called escalation, this escalation node has a bunch of different trigger topics built in so you can take it to a live person, so get your client. talk to a live person if you ever get to that escalation node, then it will transfer you to whatever your live chat feature is, what your live chat tool is, so that's the idea of ​​transferring a person in I live the way I'd like to end the last The few minutes we have here are to talk about some best practices, okay, so I want to do it in a couple of ways.

There's a section here, there's a lot of slides here that we unfortunately don't have time to talk about. the slides, but what they do discuss on these slides are some best practices and I think it would be helpful to go over that in our last few minutes here, so let's talk about some guidelines for triggering phrases because the biggest obstacle you face What's there? What you have to do is define suitable trigger phrases that are really affected because maybe at first you don't know what your users are going to type in your live chat or in your chat bot, so defining suitable trigger phrases and trigger phases is really important. so there are some good guidelines in the power point presentation that I would recommend you take a look at, but I want to go over some of them with you here in the last few minutes.

One is that you should make sure you have trigger phrases with a very clear scope your trigger phrases shouldn't stray into other topics is basically what I'm trying to say, you shouldn't have one trigger phrase that can really apply to multiple topics, if you do, That could cause some confusion with internal virtual power agents on what topic they should direct their clients to, so be very concise with the trigger phrases you have, as I mentioned before, you should have approximately five to ten trigger phrases that you have defined as part of your solution and each of those trigger phrases. they should be semantically different in some way, basically they shouldn't just rephrase an article, um, one little word there, they should be somewhat different between each of the trigger phrases to start and be effective, and you should use words that your customers use the right you don't have, although this is an automated system, you don't have to make it talk like a robot, so when you message your users and use trigger phrases, make them actually interact with your customers like they want to interact and then I also mentioned to avoid very ambiguous trigger phrases, avoid those that can be confused in several topics, so let's take an example, let's say we are looking at our return topic for an article that we created. and a couple of key things to point out here, you really want to make sure that your description has a goal, what the purpose of your topic is and make that theory clear and then also, like we said, have five to ten trigger phrases built in, make them short. you don't want to have trigger phrases that are blonde and ten words, they should be pretty short and concise and then you also want to make sure that those trigger phrases are, like I said, semantically different, they shouldn't be basically the same with just one. different word, they should be quite different, you should also avoid things like articles or adding articles essentially doesn't help here, you can add pluralization, adding and pluralization doesn't really help, so even if you make these changes like adding products versus just one product it doesn't really makes a big difference, you can do it if it just doesn't help at all, so you're wasting your time and finally, we talked about avoiding ambiguous phrases, the reason for that and we To sum this up, you don't want powerful virtual agents to get confused about what issue needs to be addressed, so in the scenario you see on the screen here, I have two issues, one called return an item and another called cancel and order.

They're both using a trigger phrase that uses the phrase cancel or cancel order, so it's a little confusing as to how you should be able to handle that, so there's definitely a lot of good information here. I would recommend taking a look. the deck a little bit more, there are a lot of slides there, a lot of good information, but for today, if you have some time to continue with the class, I would recommend that you move on to labs five and six, those were the ones we did. I can't get it, but they are pretty good at showing you how you can integrate Power Automate into Power Virtual Agents.

Lab number nine, which later on also looks at some best practices, and then if I can give you some advice here, you can In conclusion, I definitely recommend that you take your time before you jump on the tech whiteboard to express your thoughts or what It's my actual preference: to use sticky notes to get a sticky note and list my topics on a sticky note. I have a theme for each sticky note and then under those themes I start thinking about different trigger phrases that I would have and then I use sticky notes underneath to even have things like, what are the different things that I want to have?

I have a question about what your lawn looks like. I want to have a question. A message I send you. I'm sorry to hear that the plan is planned in advance, so please use some time in advance to plan ahead. you just jump into technology and that tends to make things a lot more successful if you can plan ahead. You can usually make technology do what you want. If you jump directly totechnology, many times you will feel limited by what you perceive. technology can do, but start planning first and then jump into this later. There are also a couple of things to keep track of.

I definitely recommend, I'll mention again, that you sign up for our trial of our on-demand learning, which has even more. This class you've been sitting in today was already recorded there for free, so if you sign up for the test on the events page here, it'll send you an email with your login information later, it's You may want to check your junk mail or spam to make sure you receive it. If you don't receive that information about your test, you can email me and I'll give you my information right here. Oh, it's in the chat window.

Brian, put it in the chat window. You are already testing in the chat window. Perfect. So that's all for today, I hope you enjoyed this. We will do more of these sessions starting in October. We will be hosting a session on Azure Data Services and hope to have it coming soon. I'm going to do a sort of three-hour overview of Azure data services and that's going to focus a lot on, you know, I'm just getting started with Azure, there's a lot of things that go into Azure, like if someone asked the question. what is azure is like saying what is microsoft is such a complicated question that we are going to spend our next learning session with the nerds in October talking about how you can get that understanding of all the data services within azure, there is much more to it than only data services in blue, but we will focus on that and then in December we will also consider doing a session on dax. dax is the query language for power bi, so if you are interested in learning more. about dax, we will be doing more sessions every two months essentially and they will all be free so we hope to see you there soon and thank you so much for joining me today.

I hope you enjoyed the class talk soon, thank you.