Power Virtual Agents (PVA) allow you to create dynamic, powerful chatbots for your organization like never before, often without having to write a line of code.
Using Power Virtual Agents, organizations can quickly and easily create and deploy chatbots that:
- Interact with customers, employees, visitors to your website or service
- Quickly respond to common questions without having to force users to search for content
- Prompt users with follow up questions or possible responses
- Gather data from users to use in back end processing
- Execute workflows using Power Automate
- Extend with code using the Bot Framework
Power Virtual Agents comes with an intuitive authoring canvas for creating logic for gathering input, presenting messages, and making choices based on user input, again with no code needed.
Power Virtual Agents is available as both a standalone web app and an application from within Microsoft Teams. The functionality between these two apps are similar, but there are a few key distinctions that you need to be aware of if you do not have a Power Virtual Agents subscription, as detailed in the table below:
|
Feature |
Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams |
Power Virtual Agents Web Application |
|
Licensing |
Licensed under select Microsoft 365 Subscriptions except for GCC and EDU as part of Dataverse |
Premium subscription required |
|
Deployment |
Can only be deployed as an app in Teams |
Can be deployed to Teams, Channels, or other sites |
|
Power Automate |
Standard connectors only without a PVA subscription |
Premium connectors available |
|
Security |
Secure access enabled by default, no ability to generate secrets to enable secure access |
Ability to generate secrets and turn on or off secure access as wanted by the bot author |
|
Azure Bot Framework |
Not Available |
Ability to extend PVA’s with Azure Bot Framework |
For more information on licensing, check out: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-virtual-agents/requirements-licensing-subscriptions
If you currently have a Microsoft 365 subscription and are not GCC or EDU you can likely start building Power Virtual Agents for Microsoft Teams today without additional licensing. To see how to create and deploy one of these chatbots, check out the blog post from PAIT Group Partner and MVP Mark Rackley: http://www.attainableai.com/2021/01/an-introduction-to-power-virtual-agents-for-microsoft-teams/
**Mark will be presenting on this topic at TEC: The Experts Conference September 1-2 2021. **