From the course: Learning Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents: The basics - Power Virtual Agents Tutorial

From the course: Learning Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

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Power Virtual Agents: The basics

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- [Instructor] Chatbots in general and Power Virtual Agents specifically have some terminology, some names for the parts and pieces, the objects that we'll be working with. So let's do a quick overview of what the parts and pieces are and how they fit together. This is the Power Virtual Agents authoring environment. And if you work along with me, you'll be creating this bot and we can test the bot right here. So a bot consists of a series of topics. Some of them are built into the system and some of them are topics that we can create. With few exceptions, each of the topics has what's called the trigger phrase, something that someone says or writes in order to get into that topic. So these trigger phrases are items that the bot is watching for. For example, if we scroll down the system topics, we'll find that there are 52 different ways to get into the greeting topic. So if a person types "Hi" that's one of the 52 ways, and there's a response. "I'm a virtual agent I can help with account questions, orders, et cetera." If the person typed "Good morning." It has exactly the same effect because this is number two of the 52 different ways on the right hand side What we see is the conversation path within this topic. This particular topic is called greeting. At the top, we have the trigger phrases. Then we have the messages, three of them. This is the path. Each of these boxes that says message on it is called a node and messages aren't the only kind of nodes. We can ask questions in a node, or we could use a node to invoke a condition. If then we could have a node that launched a workflow in power automate. But for right now, we have three message nodes here that we then see reflected in the chat. So our bot has topics, topics have trigger phrases and topics also have a conversation path composed of nodes. There are other terms that I'll introduce as we need them during the course. As we start out though, know that what we're going to spend our time doing is creating topics, including the trigger phrases and really solid conversation paths that will help guide our users towards the solution that they are seeking.

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