Improvements from Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

I have just been looking into some of the improvements in Microsofts Virtual Agent.

Fallback

When the bot does not know what the user is trying to say, you can now customise the response using Fallback:

This gives a much needed additional functionality as well as giving the triggered phrase as a variable for notifications or passing as part of the escalation process.   You can also see in the picture another additional feature....

Global Variables

You can now ask the user their name and have the bot remember it throughout the entire conversation, this was an oversight that was glaring in its omission.





The VA will create the variable as bot.VariableName in all other topics.   While this does remedy a lot of issues, there is one feature still missing from PowerVA that makes life quite difficult.

Variable Comparison

While Global Variables was without a workaround, this issue at least has some options.






Whenever you ask a question you have the ability to validate the response against a value.   What you cannot do is validate it against a variable.  So if you get data from an external system you cannot compare it to a user response.

You can get around this issue by using a Power Automate that you can pass the variables into and pass back a true/false flag.   While not ideal it does at least work.