microsoft power apps Archives - BotCore Enterprise Chatbot Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:50:40 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://botcore.ai/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-favicon-32x32-1-70x70.png microsoft power apps Archives - BotCore 32 32 Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code https://botcore.ai/blog/low-code-chatbots/ Fri, 15 Jan 2021 10:33:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7476 Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code Gartner predicts, Low-code application building would gather more than 65% of all app development functions by the year 2024. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the entire business landscape and compelled businesses to face never-seen-before challenges and develop new workflows. Moreover, an increasing focus on the digitization of the […]

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Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code

Gartner predicts, Low-code application building would gather more than 65% of all app development functions by the year 2024.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the entire business landscape and compelled businesses to face never-seen-before challenges and develop new workflows. Moreover, an increasing focus on the digitization of the industry drove up the demand for text and voice-based bots that automate day-to-day operations and deliver exceptional customer support.

With the IT department dealing with massive resource scarcity and struggling to develop apps for various business problems, enterprises started looking at smart solutions that allow people with little or no coding knowledge to quickly deploy AI-powered bots for a host of business use cases. No wonder many organizations turned to low-code app development platforms (LCAPs).

Low-code platforms are indeed the future of chatbot development. So, what’s a low-code app development platform? A low-code application platform, or an LCAP, is an interactive platform that leverages a visual interface, such as drag-and-drop tooling and pre-configured templates, to empower users to develop and deploy professional-grade bots within days.

Let’s explore further.

Benefits of building chatbots on a low-code platform

1. Infuses agility

The first and foremost advantage of low-code development is the agility that it allows in business operations because a) it’s quicker to build bots with pre-built modules and templates in a visual interface, b) employees, who are experts in their domains, can easily develop and refine their bots without the need to explain their ideas to others (coders). Research has shown low-code platforms can potentially reduce development time by up to 90%.

2. Reduces development costs

Hiring skilled developers proves heavier on the cost side. Low-code solutions require little or no coding knowledge, so professional and citizen developers alike can quickly build and deploy any app, making it economically viable to create intelligent chatbots for different business use cases, including service desk management, IT helpdesk, HR automation, etc.

3. Allows flexible integration

Low-code app development platforms allow integration with various SaaS-based and on-premise enterprise systems, helping organizations get a single-window view of their data.

4. Encourages innovation across functions and levels

Since low-code platforms enable domain/subject-matter experts to collaborate, develop, and customize their bots, they democratize innovation by not restricting it to a core team or group of individuals.

Seven low-code development tools for chatbots

1. Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is a Microsoft software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering in the low-code app development space. Microsoft’s Cloud services host the application; hence PVA significantly reduces the need for a conducive environment to deploy and maintain the bots.

Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services form the SDK to build chatbots using a guided, no-code visual interface, allowing citizen developers to build and deploy chatbots quickly. PVA greatly reduces the need to have the infrastructure to maintain and deploy chatbots as Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services does all the heavy lifting of providing a conducive environment to host the application.

Read More: Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

2. Chatfuel

Chatfuel is a leading low-code chatbot development platform for Facebook Messenger. Chatfuel supports many languages and allows integration with several third-party apps.
Chatfuel’s built-in guides and predefined bot templates help create bots for automated customer support and sales and marketing activities easily. An analytics dashboard allows users to monitor and analyze several business and chatbot metrics.

3. FlowXO

FlowXO enables users to build both simple and complex AI bots and connect them to more than 100 different cloud apps. FlowXO provides a visual flow editor, supports multilingual chatbots, and allows integration with popular apps, such as Facebook and Slack. Other features include the ability to send emails and attachments and build chatbot widgets for websites.

4. Botsify

Botsify uses an easy-to-navigate drag-and-drop interface that enables users to build template designs for chatbots. Botsify’s chatbots are used by well-established companies, including Apple and Shazam.

The bots integrate with services, such as WordPress, Alexa, ZenDesk, Google Sheets, etc., and can collate user information, track sales leads, and automate sales chats.

5. BotKit

With a semantic chat interface, BotKit’s chatbots imitate human conversations. The platform boasts interesting features like a visual conversation builder and open source libraries.

Other features include activity monitoring, detailed statistics, and flexible API integrations.

6. TARS

TARS is another low-code bot-building platform that democratizes the process of building chatbots with pre-built templates that are easy to edit and customize.

Other exciting features of the platform include – integration with Zapier, file and image upload, custom branding, API integration, and the option to export data to Excel/CSV.

7. BotCore

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy AI-enabled chatbots quickly with our low-code enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

Fully deployable on Microsoft Cloud, BotCore’s graphical interface with drag-and-drop functionality, pre-built templates, and an integrated Knowledge Graph consisting of multi-functional nodes enable professional and citizen developers alike to create and deploy chatbots in a matter of days.

Some of the powerful features of BotCore include –

  • BotCore leverages Message Definition Language (MDL) to define bot responses
  • Technologies like natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and machine learning enable our bots to understand the context, learn from past conversations, and respond to users in a human-like manner.
  • Seamless agent handover capability allows bots to handle simple requests while escalating the more complex ones to human agents when needed.
  • BotCore will enable clients to build multilingual bots that can be deployed across various channels, giving users a seamless omnichannel experience.
  • Our bots can aggregate the best of Microsoft technologies, including LUIS bots, Power Virtual Agents, QnA Maker bots, and other third-party bot applications.

To know more about BotCore, feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our chatbot experts.

Further Reading:

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]]> Why are we excited about Power Virtual Agents? https://botcore.ai/blog/why-are-we-excited-about-power-virtual-agents/ Mon, 11 Nov 2019 18:30:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=4010 Why Are We Excited About Power Virtual Agents? At this year’s Ignite , Microsoft made several announcements related to conversational AI and chatbots. One of the key announcements that caught our attention is the launch of Power Virtual Agents as a part of Microsoft’s citizen development vision of Power Platform. Power Platform as you know had until now […]

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Why Are We Excited About Power Virtual Agents?

At this year’s Ignite , Microsoft made several announcements related to conversational AI and chatbots. One of the key announcements that caught our attention is the launch of Power Virtual Agents as a part of Microsoft’s citizen development vision of Power Platform.

Power Platform as you know had until now a few powerful tools like Power BI, Power Apps & Flow (now called Power Automate). With the addition of Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft is essentially connecting all their previous investments in these respective technologies. At the same time, addressing the key questions that many customers and partners had been inquisitive about: Where is Microsoft’s bot builder platform?

conversational AI & microsoft

With the launch of the Microsoft Bot Framework in early 2016, Microsoft paved the way for customers and vendors alike to start experimenting and developing chatbots. Simply put, Bot framework is an SDK and coupled with the Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services like LUIS and QnA Maker using which developers can build some pretty cool chatbots. However, bot building is yet regarded as technical & complex. To bridge this gap and democratize bot building, solutions like BotCore were developed that put the business analyst or the power user in the driver seat.

With Power Virtual Agents rollout, we are comprehending that all these investments that Microsoft has done since 2016 are all coming together. Not to any wonder, Bot Framework and other cognitive services which are used to enable chatbots forms the foundation of Power Virtual Agents. The building experience is however very simple. This platform doesn’t necessitate an understanding of concepts like intents, utterances, entities etc. which every bot developer and trainer swear by. A power business user can go from zero to a working bot in a matter of minutes!

experiments with power virtual agents

One thing that is true with any chatbot rollout is to fail faster and keep trying. Chatbots can be used to automate a lot of different areas. However, if you choose a use case that happens to complicate the end-user experience or make it difficult for a user to get the job done – your chatbot adoption is at stake!

Once you identify a process or area that can be handled by a chatbot, using Power Virtual Agents, you can quickly create, test and deploy the agent to your users. Call it a PoC or MVP or Pilot or anything else that assures your users that there will be more improvements going forward. This helps you to test the waters before embarking on a larger enterprise-wide journey that would take more time and effort.

areas of employee support within the enterprise

Power Virtual Agents platform was developed as part of the Dynamics family of products and was primarily built for customer support use-case. However, the chatbots built using it can be deployed for your internal customers or employees as well. The whole notion behind chatbots is to offer quick front office or L1 support, effectively eliminating or reducing low-value requests that come into your contact centre or helpdesk.

Few of the areas, where we see Power Virtual Agents being used within the enterprise are:

  • IT Support

    • FAQ

    • Self-help and troubleshooting

    • Triaging a problem before creating an incident or request in ITSM tools

  • HR Support

    • FAQ

    • Automating simpler processes like time-off

    • Displaying & validating employee information like contact details etc. from HRIS

  • Compliance

    • FAQ

    • Guided dialog conversations to help identify the right action to be taken given a situation

  • Finance

    • FAQ

    • Requesting for payroll or benefit related information

integrating power virtual agents with enterprise apps

If you have seen or used Microsoft Flow (Power Automate) before, you are in business! That’s because Power Virtual Agents can seamlessly connect with Power Automate flows to integrate with a wide variety of enterprise applications.

Few examples of integrations that you can use today are:

  • SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, etc

  • Dynamics 365

  • Salesforce

  • ServiceNow

  • Freshdesk

  • Zendesk

  • Workday HCM

  • Box

  • DocuSign

  • Jira

And many many more…

making power virtual agents accessible to your employees

At the time of this writing, Power Virtual Agents can be deployed on a variety of different messaging applications.

Power Virtual Agent Dashboard 1024x576

What’s exciting us the most is the ability to launch an agent on Microsoft Teams on the click of a button!

Once you build your agent, you can enable it on Teams and get your pilot group to start using and testing the bot. With any chatbot, the crucial step is to collect lots of feedback from your pilot or early users before you go to a larger audience.

securing your power virtual agents

This part is a bit technical as it does involve some knowledge of Active Directory. However, once you have the configuration in place, you can protect your sensitive data and transactions by ensuring that an employee is properly signed in before the dialogue is executed.

Pva Flow 681x1024

conclusion

With Power Virtual Agents, any enterprise with Office 365 can start building chatbots to automate a wide variety of use cases. Something that was once considered as the complex is now democratized – true to Microsoft’s mission of empowering every person and every organization to achieve more.

With this level of proliferation of chatbots within an enterprise, we see that the transition from apps to conversational bots is all set to increase in pace. Many enterprises are using Acuvate’s BotCore for a similar end.

BotCore is a chatbot middleware and aggregation platform that helps customers to build virtual agents and, as well, connect existing bots within a single enterprise persona. Together, Power Virtual Agents and BotCore can aid in an AI-driven Digital Transformation within the enterprise. At Acuvate we are looking forward to automating and solving complex enterprise problems with our customers using Power Virtual Agents!

Read more: A Buyer’s Guide To Choosing The Best Chatbot Builder Platform

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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