Plan and prepare for Power Virtual Agents in 2021 release wave 2
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
The 2021 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2021 to March 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Power Virtual Agents.
Overview
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 2 brings improvements in the authoring experience with variable passing between topics, list variables, inline images and videos, regular expressions in custom entities, and commenting. We are also facilitating initial bot setup with bot creation from templates, sharing bots with security groups, and new AI capabilities to build your bots automatically from website content.
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.
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.
For official product documentation and training for Power Virtual Agents, go to:
- Power Virtual Agents documentation
- Power Virtual Agents training on Microsoft Learn
- Power Virtual Agents videos on YouTube
Updates to Power Virtual Agents 2021 release wave 2
Tip
Download the release overview guide and share with your team as you plan to onboard the new capabilities included in this release wave.
* Overview guide available in English version only
Investment areas
Core authoring
Creating a bot with Power Virtual Agents is easy to do with the no-code authoring canvas, and there are a number of ways you can manage how topics interact, how you want the conversation to flow, and what it should feel like.
It's easy to test the bot without having to fully deploy the bot whenever you make a small change. There are also lesson topics that guide you through topic authoring from simple to complex scenarios as well as default system topics. You can choose what language you want your bot to use, too. Variables and entities make your bot more capable of understanding your users, and rich content makes your bot more relatable and easier to use.
Bot configuration
Bots can be configured to suit the individual needs of an organization and to provide further extensibility with other services and features. This includes authentication provider support, the use of Microsoft Bot Framework skills to augment the bot’s capabilities, integration with Microsoft Teams, Facebook, and other channels, and more.
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. |