Plan and prepare for Power Virtual Agents in 2023 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, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans.
Important
The 2023 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2023 to September 2023. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Power Virtual Agents.
Overview
Power Virtual Agents enable anyone in your organization to create AI-powered bots that can chat with users about specific topics. Your bots can answer routine questions, resolve common issues, or automate tasks that take up valuable customer or employee time.
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 answer a customer's questions.
Power Virtual Agents has deep integration with Power Automate and the Microsoft Bot Framework. Authors can extend their bots to integrate with API backends which enables 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.
The 2023 release wave 1 brings improvements to the authoring experience. This includes topic overlap detection in all Power Virtual Agents languages, adaptive card authoring, multi-modal response authoring, and more.
Updates to Power Virtual Agents 2023 release wave 1
Investment areas
Core authoring
Create bots with Power Virtual Agents using the no-code authoring canvas to manage how topics interact, design conversation flow, and customize the look and feel. Then test changes to your bot without having to fully deploy it.
Enhance your bots further with variables and entities to make your bot more capable of understanding your users. Then add rich content, such as Adaptive Cards and Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), to make your bots more relatable and easier to use. Manage all of your bots in one place with the improved app navigation.
Copilot and AI innovation
Power Virtual Agents has always been at the forefront of how AI can be leveraged to produce eloquent, appropriate responses to your bot users' questions and issues. We're investing heavily in recent advancements in natural language understanding (NLU) and large-language model (LLM) AI technology.
This wave, in particular, delivers additions that will make your bots easier to create, faster to iterate with, and more useful across a wider range of chatbot usage scenarios.
The generative answers capability in Power Virtual Agents lets you specify existing internal and external sources that a bot can use to answer a user's questions. The capability uses AI to intelligently create fully conversational responses to your bot users' queries - without your bot makers first needing to manually create individual topics for every eventuality.
In this wave, we're adding the following as sources that your bot can use to gather information:
- Content stored on SharePoint sites
- Content stored in Dataverse
These sources will only generate answers from information the bot user can access.
Bot configuration
Power Virtual Agents provides several ways to configure your bots to adapt to your needs. Configuration settings also allow you to extend your bots with other services and features. This includes authentication provider support, the use of Microsoft Bot Framework skills to augment the bot’s capabilities, and channel integration, such as Microsoft Teams and Facebook.
Enhanced natural language capabilities
Power Virtual Agents is powered by conversational AI and natural language capabilities, which enable the system to understand complex language, parse it for the appropriate information, and ask for clarification when needed.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Power Virtual Agents below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Power Virtual Agents
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Power Virtual Agents. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Power Virtual Agents. |
| User community | Engage with Power Virtual Agents experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Power Virtual Agents. |