Bots free up our people to be more productive – and give our customers more hours of service
Bots built with using PVA are great for scenarios such as being embedded in a website and answering FAQs and perform basic customer support triage, with the option of enabling hand-off to a human agent. Here we begin to see the benefit of reducing workload on support staff and offering an enhanced service to customers by having the bot be able to deal with certain queries out of hours where human agents aren’t available.
What is bot? When and why is bot? Bots can answer your most burning questions
Microsoft’s QnA Maker is a tool that deploys and configures a set of components into Microsoft Azure including
- An Azure Search instance
- An Azure App Service with a DotNetCore coded bot (but no coding is required!)
- A Bot Service registration
- A QnA Service registration
Once deployed, the QnA Service is ready to be taught. You can impart knowledge one question and answer at a time, or else by preparing formatted Excel or Word documents. Using Word Documents are the preferred method as the ingest process can take into account header hierarchies and paragraphs to produce richer and multi-part answers.
Although not necessary to produce a working bot, the code can be tweaked to introduce new functionality or tweak behaviour.
Bots are powerful and do things! (And a word of caution..)
If you need a bot to go beyond answering queries or gathering information and to begin to take action, you may need to look beyond PVA, or at least the base set of skills available. While it has some ability to trigger external actions by trigger Power Automate Flows, more advanced scenarios will require some degree of coded development. The great news is that the Bot Framework supports multiple languages (NodeJS/JavaScript,DotNetCore), integrates with Microsoft Cognitive Services, and takes care of things like managing conversation and dialog state, authentication, message delivery.
Coded bots can do just about anything (a computer can do) and so are an amazing opportunity to develop new and wonderful services. However, while the chat interface is great for some use cases, for others it is not. For example, browsing and filtering large sets of data. I have seen demos which stretch the paradigm beyond credibility, including a Microsoft one for browsing properties on an Estate Agent’s website, which was frustrating enough to watch in a demo, let alone to use for real. Just a reminder to build services people want to use (I’m a techie, I’ve made this mistake.. )
Bots are easy to use!
Bots offer a new, more intuitive, conversational way of interacting with services. Nothing is more natural in our modern digital lives than a back and forth conversation via text or even speech. Bots can guide users through complex tasks by prompting for and validating information given to them in a series of simple steps.