Overview of Power Virtual Agents 2021 release wave 1

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to Power Virtual Agents overview. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Important

Some of the functionality described in this release plan has not been released. Delivery timelines may change and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). Learn more: What's new and planned

Power Virtual Agents enables anyone in your organization to create AI-powered bots that can chat with users about specific topics. They can answer routine questions, resolve common issues, or automate tasks that take up valuable customer or employee time.

The 2021 release wave 1 brings improvements in the authoring experience with topic suggestions from bot sessions, Power Apps Portals integration, data loss prevention options, proactive bot update messaging in Microsoft Teams, and more. We're also building on our Power Automate integration with better error handling and new topic trigger management to improve your bot's triggering capabilities. Finally, we will acquire PCI and HITRUST certifications, and gain support for the government cloud.

Creating a bot is typically a complex and time-intensive process, requiring long content update cycles and a team of experts. Power Virtual Agents gives anyone in your organization the ability to create powerful custom bots using an easy, code-free graphical interface, without the need for AI experts, data scientists, or teams of developers. A bot can interact with users, ask for clarifying information, and ultimately answer a user's questions.

With deep integration with Power Automate and the Microsoft Bot Framework, authors can extend their bots to integrate with API back ends, which will enable the bots to handle additional topics, limited only by the author’s imagination. You can deploy bots to many channels including websites, Microsoft Teams, and Facebook.

As users interact with a bot, the author can see which topics are performing well, and which need improvement.

Use Power Virtual Agents documentation to get detailed information and answers to address your needs, from basic authoring tips all the way to complex bot configuration topics.

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