Extend Power Virtual Agent with Microsoft Bot Framework

Ever since Microsoft came up with the Power Virtual Agent for Customr Service, it was well received by the organizations and community as potential tool for enhancing customer experience and resolving issues effectively any time of the day, any day of the week.

The main goal to introduce Virtual Agent was to empower your customer support specialists and subject matter experts—the people closest to the customer—to build and update your bot. This approach can significantly reduce costs by automating common questions, and free up agent (human) time to focus on more complex cases.

Virtual Agent is a complete No-Code tool which can only be extended through Microsoft Flow to call external services and achieve business goals. Therefore, there’s a limit on what you can customize such as customer outreach on different / multiple channels, designing for speech, integrating LUIS or QnAMaker etc.

Last week, after my talk at AI Happy Hour, I was asked by if there’s a
possibility to extend Virtual Agent with existing Microsoft Bot
Framework. My short answer to that person was ‘Yes, it is possible’
and I gave him a few pointers there.

Later on, I decided to come up with a guide so that everyone who wants to extend their bot solutions can take an advantage from it.

Let’s suppose you work for a digital bank and you’ve got a Virtual Agent with usual queries setup and you also have a custom Bot built with Microsoft Bot Framework. The goal is to extend/combine your Power Virtual Agent with your existing (or new) custom bot. So, in this post, we will discuss the possibilities and pre-requisites to achieve that.

The complete post is published on The Dev Community.