Are you looking to make fast-loading web pages for your business? 

The faster your page loads, the longer visitors spend time on your website. Here is a new framework that makes the loading time of your web page 10X faster. This amazing technology is AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP optimizes a web page’s loading speed time to just a few seconds.   

What is AMP? 

AMP is an open-source HTML framework developed by the AMP Open-Source Project. Google created it as a competitor to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. It is optimized for mobile web browsing and designed to help web pages load faster. And AMP pages can be cached by a CDN, such as Microsoft Bing or Cloudflare’s AMP caches, allowing pages to be served speedily. 

Why AMP? 

Usually, mobile pages have problems like slow loading, unresponsive pages and content displaced by ads et cetera. Studies show that, 

• 75% of mobile pages take 10+ seconds to load. 
• 53% of mobile site visitors leave after 3+ seconds of loading time 

Maintaining a fast mobile website to overcome these problems on your own often requires large development teams or specialized skill sets.

AMP helps to overcome these issues as a smart solution. It does not require a large development team budget. And to top it off, it is compatible with all modern browsers!

With AMP you can have, 

• A compelling user experience with near-instantaneous loading and smooth scrolling
• 2X more mobile ad revenue for sites that load in 2 seconds vs 19 seconds

For developers and publishers, it creates opportunities for distribution on Google, Bing, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc.

AMP Structure 

Accelerated Mobile Pages are built of 3 components – AMP HTML, AMP JS, and AMP Cache.

AMP Cache helps with validating AMP pages with fetched cache.  AMP is component-based and is not dependent on any special tooling. All components are with Standard HTML, CSS & JS.

AMP provides a static layout and minimum size stylesheet with inline & size-bound CSS.  

“Hello World” with AMP 

Authored by Evantha Harshana @ BISTEC Global

Power Virtual Agents from Microsoft allow you to develop intelligent chatbots that can answer questions from users, consumers, and even workers in many languages, allowing you to automate customer service and team management activities.

What is the most attractive feature of Power Virtual Agents?

No programming is needed!

It is also called low code – no code concept as you may incorporate these bots into your processes without the assistance of any data science or engineering staff. This ensures fewer outgoings and none of the complicated code that is expected when integrating this technology.

Within this blog let’s discover how Power Virtual Agents make things easy to connect with consumers in a variety of settings.

Contents

1. What is Virtual Agent?

2. How can we use PVA?

3. Advantages of PVA

4. Real-world examples

5. Understanding Power Virtual Agent chatbot in detail

6. Implementing a chatbot

7. Conclusion

1. What is Virtual Agent?

Power Virtual Agents from Microsoft are intelligent chatbots that respond to inquiries from clients, customers, and team members without the need for human interaction. Rather than dealing with staff communications constantly or paying a large customer care crew to speak with customers, you may create smart bots that handle all of the jobs for you.

Chatbots are growing more popular for businesses of all sizes. According to research, by the end of 2021, 85 percent of customer contacts will be conducted without the use of human agents. And chatbots can lower operating expenses in an organization by up to 30 percent.

Power Virtual Agents, on the other hand, are even more beneficial to organizations due to their integration with so many other programs, services, and connections in the Microsoft ecosystem. Power Virtual Agents, which are part of the Power Apps package, sync with numerous technologies to facilitate interactions across many platforms. For example, Microsoft Teams. When Power Virtual Agents and Teams are combined, you can automate chats with teammates and solve problems rapidly.

2. How can we use PVA?

Power Virtual Agents enables you to build intelligent chatbots that can respond to inquiries provided by customers, other workers, or visitors to your website or business.

These bots may be simply constructed without the assistance of data scientists or engineers. Power Virtual Agents bots have been utilized in a variety of ways, including,

• To track COVID-19 infection rates and other information
• To establish support for Sales and other issues.
• Opening hours and store information
• Employee health and vacation benefits
• Common employee questions for businesses

Power Virtual Agents is accessible as a standalone web app as well as an inbuilt app in Microsoft Teams. Most of the features are similar across the two. However, depending on how you want to use Power Virtual Agents, there may be distinct reasons to select one version over the other.

3. Advantages of PVA

• No coding required
• Use of graphical interface to easily integrate a powerful chatbot
• Able to integrate with hundreds of pre-built connectors
• Compatible with a large number of platforms
• Able to connect custom workflows to automate the bot
• High accuracy
• Low labour cost

4. Real-world examples

 Miami Dolphins

• Implemented a chatbot that managed 40,000 conversations with fans, answering 97 per cent of queries and enhancing customer satisfaction

Kobe City, Japan

• A COVID-19 response chatbot was implemented to rapidly offer information to its citizens, lowering phone traffic by 90%

San Diego Workforce Partnership

• San Diego Workforce Partnership had an inflow of displaced employees, and its AI-supported virtual agent assisted by processing 75% of enquiries.

OBB

• OBB, Austria’s rail network, developed an AI-assisted chatbot to automate simple customer contacts, freeing up human workers for more difficult problems.

TruGreen

• In only two days, TruGreen designed an AI-powered virtual agent bot to answer regular enquiries and take action depending on consumer intent.

5. Understanding Power Virtual Agent chatbot in detail

Topics

Topics for the bot can be created by users, who can program conversation pathways that can have several branchings based on the customer’s inquiries and replies to the Power Virtual Agent. The authoring canvas may be used to configure topics. Topics can be toggled on and off.

When a new bot is formed, the system generates lesson topics that the Power Virtual Agent administrator may utilize to learn how to develop Power Virtual Agent content. Please keep in mind that these lesson topics are just for training purposes and should not be used in production.

Trigger Phrases

Each topic should have a few keywords linked with it. Trigger phrases are phrases or keywords that users may enter to direct the bot to a certain topic. It’s critical to realize that trigger words don’t have to be accurate, which is where machine learning comes in. For example, if a subject includes a trigger phrase named “I want help” but the user enters in “help” or “need a help” the bot will still direct the user to the correct topic.

Entities

Power Virtual Agent has a library of pre-built entities. Entities may be used to inform the bot not only what sort of data to look for when a client writes into the chat window (email address, money, a person’s name, etc.), but also how to record that data. There is, for example, an age object that allows Power Virtual Agent to extract an actual number from the data entered in the chat window. If the user input is ‘I’m 19 years old,’ the bot will save the value ’19’. Alternatively, if someone writes in ‘Five years,’ the bot will save it as a value of ‘5’.

We may also design our own custom entities, which allow us to enter a list of objects as well as synonyms for those items. These lists can be used to organize or categorize words. For example, if you’re creating a bot to handle the status of a request, you may have an object named Request Status with values like ‘Pending’, ‘Completed’, ‘Rejected‘, and so on. By putting these elements into a single list, the bot is able to better analyze the data that is entered.

We may enable smart matching in these custom entities, which allows the bot to detect things in the list even if the user misspells an item or uses a similar term, such as matching ‘status’ to ‘state.’

Authoring Canvas

From this point, we can start to build our bot. Admins will most likely spend most of their time here, as this is where subjects’ questions, responses, actions, and variables are configured. Anyone with less knowledge about chatbots can also write the canvas’s user interface, although it might get a little busy if you have a lot of questions with different branches. When you begin to construct your dialogue, you have several alternatives to pick from,

• Message: Each message can be formatted by using the options on the screen. We can also insert data stored in variables within the message. (i.e., if the bot captured the customer’s name earlier, we can use that variable later in the conversation)

• Ask a question: Show a message: Displays question from VPA; we can use variables to capture customer responses

• Call an action: The action option allows admins to trigger logic from outside VPA, this can be a Power Automate Flow or a Skills action

• Show a message: Shows a message to a user, a response is not captured

• Redirect to another topic: This step will redirect the conversation to another topic

• End the conversation: Ends the conversation either with a survey or by transferring to a live agent

Variables

Variables are placeholders in which the application records customer responses and can be used in a variety of ways by administrators. The variable data can be used in the conversation that Power Virtual Agent has with the customer.

For example, if Power Virtual Agent asks the customer what his first name is, the customer replies Ben, which is saved as ‘Name Variable,’ and responds to the client by saying “Nice to meet you ‘Name Variable,’ which will appear to the client as “Nice to meet you, Ben”. Variables can also be supplied externally to the Power Virtual Agent.

Administrators can run actions (such as Power Automate Flow) and move data from variables to Power Automate Flow. Power Automate will then run and provide the data to Power Virtual Agent, which can subsequently be used in the client discussion. Power Virtual Agent asks the client for an email address and then searches the Dynamics 365 CE database to check whether there is a lead or contact record in the database with that email address. If no contact is available it will have Power Automate build a lead in Dynamics 365.

Publishing

Power Virtual Agent can be deployed through a variety of channels, including custom websites, mobile applications, and chat apps like Facebook Messenger and Microsoft Teams. Administrators of Power Virtual Agent can utilize the demo website to test the topics after they have been set up and published. This URL can be shared both internally and internationally, but it is not a live site. After running numerous tests, the Power Virtual Agent administrator may analyze the scans for each specific issue.

6. Making the first chatbot

Step 01

Sign in to Power Virtual Agent and click ‘start free’

Then sign in with your O365 mail.

Step 02

Fill in the bot name and language in the bot creation window.

After filling in all the needed fields, click Create.

Step 03

Create a new topic with an appropriate name.

Create a trigger phrase as the below figure trigger phrases are,

• What are the opening hours?

• When are opens?

• Are you open today

After creating the trigger phrase click the Go to author canvas and you will direct to the author canvas.

Step 04

After being directed to author canvas, the flow of the chatbot is displayed with the created trigger phrases.

Continue the flow as you like with the questions, messages, variables etc.

Step 05

After finishing the flow you can select the End the conversation to finish the flow.

The flow will be completed as in the below figure.

Step 06

Click the save button to save the flow of the newly created chatbot.

Step 07

Test your chatbot by clicking the Test your bot.

You can do a test run of the created chatbot after that.

Step 08

Select the publish Icon in the navigation pane.

Step 09

Click the Publish button to publish your chatbot.

7. Conclusion

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents allows you to engage with clients, consumers, and team members in up to 60 different languages without writing code. Integrating this technology into your firm provides various communication benefits without the need to invest thousands of dollars in data engineers.

Working with a Power Virtual Agent partner enhances your experience. A professional will customize the program to your exact company requirements and give you all of the tools you’ll need for effective setup and ongoing maintenance. This suggests that communication will improve with time.

Authored by Bhashitha Dhananjaya @ BISTEC Global