AI chatbots and virtual agents are becoming an increasingly important component of digital transformation across industries designed to improve the quality of customer interactions. Computer programs designed to simulate conversation with humans have existed for decades, but the idea of conversational AI with bot tools is relatively new. This new idea of conversational AI is built into Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent and Azure Bot Service. In today’s blog, we will outline the functionality that supports conversational AI to create outstanding customer experiences.
Dynamics 365 Virtual agent is a no-code-required AI-based application that is focused on providing customer service organizations the ability to engage in personalized conversations that go beyond the conversational search.
Virtual agents provide the ability to deploy and manage the automation of handling problems with specific solutions. Subject matter experts can be hands on to deploy solutions to problems. These experts can create, test, and launch bots using a guided code-free graphical interface and easy-to-use templates.
An important feature of the Virtual Agent is the integration with Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow). Power Automate can extend the capabilities of your Virtual agent and do things like trigger existing flows or create new ones that call backend systems without writing any code. Custom connectors can also provide extensibility.
Azure Bot Service is based on the Microsoft Bot Framework. The Bot Framework is a collection of Software Development Kits (SDKs) that can be used to build and develop bots.
Azure Bot Service can be deployed to popular channel types such as Microsoft Teams, Skype, Facebook, and Slack in order to reach customers wherever they interact.
It is a self-learning conversational AI platform that can take in data, understand the data, and then adapt the data. The bot can be deployed with QnA maker, which is an API service for conversational question-and-answer of data. This makes the discussion more interactive than a standard chatbot because it understands the data and adapts to it – and then makes suggestions based on that data. The aim of Azure Bot Service is to make the conversation as interactive as possible.
The capabilities of conversational AI interfaces for the enterprise are impressive. This functionality is part of a larger AI strategy that presents opportunities to solve business problems across applications. Artificial Intelligence is truly the future… of every industry. We only scratched the surface today – but it is a topic we’ll be writing about more often in the next few years.
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