Boost conversations with GPT-powered generative AI

  • Article

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, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans.

Enabled for Public preview General availability
Users by admins, makers, or analysts Apr 1, 2023 -

Business value

Use Boost conversations in Power Virtual Agents to enhance your bot responses with contextual answers from your website. By using the boosted conversations in Power Virtual Agents, your bot can find and present information from an external source even if you haven't created a topic for it.

Quickly create and deploy a functional bot, without having to first manually author multiple topics that may or may not cover all the questions your customers might end up asking. This massively reduces the time it can take to get a chatbot up and running.

Feature details

Power Virtual Agents uses an underlying natural language understanding model for understanding a bot user's question and determining the right topic. Typically, you create multiple topics within a bot to account for what a user might ask. Sometimes, however, a bot user might ask a question for which there is no built topic.

When this happens, by default, the bot prompts the user to rephrase their query. If, after two prompts, the bot still can't determine the user's intent, the bot escalates to a live agent through the system Escalate topic.

You can specify a system Fallback topic to customize the response and actions the bot takes - but this isn't always helpful for the bot user.

The Boost conversations option in Power Virtual Agents preview helps to solve that issue by connecting the natural language processing capabilities of Azure OpenAI, which includes use of OpenAI GPT technology, with the AI already in Power Virtual Agents (including transformer-based natural language understanding) to:

  • Understand a user's intent by parsing what they type, and determining what they're asking
  • Find, collate, and parse relevant information from a URL you specify
  • Create a plain language response and deliver that to the bot user

In other words, if the bot doesn't already have an answer for what the user is asking, it can get the information and create one on-the-fly.

Refer to the Boost conversations topic for how to set up and use Boost conversations, along with tips for getting the best from the AI.

Geographic areas

This feature will be released into the following Microsoft Azure geographic area:

  • United States

See also

Boost conversations (docs)