Overcome Power Virtual Agents limitations with Bot Framework Composer

Power Virtual Agents is a great product to make Conversational AI more accessible for many companies, but sometimes you will hit the boundaries which is usual of these no-code platforms. Normally these boundaries make it challenging to deploy this technology at your customers, what results in having to build it with PaaS components on Azure or to select another provider...

However, this is not the case with Power Virtual Agents (PVA) due to the excellent integration with Power Automate and Azure Bot Service. You can use Azure development tools like Bot Framework Composer to create custom dialogs and directly add them to PVA bots. And since these dialogs are hosted within PVA, you won't have any added complexity like Azure hosting, deployment and billing.

This will allow you to combine citizen development with pro development, in an easy and supported way. In this article I will highlight some current limitations of PVA and how to overcome them with Bot Framework Composer (currently in public preview).

Adaptive Cards & Complex entity extraction

Adaptive Cards are a great way to add UI elements to your chats, something which can be useful in many different scenarios. If your use-case requires user input, you could prompt your user for this input by using multiple text questions, but you could also do this by using a card with a form. This will allow the user to easily fill, correct and validate multiple values before sending it to the bot.

If you want to even go a step further, you could prefill these Adaptive Cards based on your user input. The Natural Language Understanding (NLU) of PVA is currently limited in terms of entity extraction, especially compared to Language Understanding on Azure (LUIS). Within a Composer dialog you could manually call the LUIS API via REST to receive the extracted entities from the user input in PVA. When PVA NLU supports more advanced entity extraction, you could simply rewrite your topic to use the built-in capabilities. See the image below for an example.

Buttons

It is a common practice to include buttons in the welcome menu, to help users navigate through your bot. Currently PVA only supports rendering menu choices as suggested actions, where some customer would like to use a vertical menu. Using Bot Framework Composer, you could create these buttons and include them in your welcome dialog.

You can even configure the input that needs to be posted in the chat (imback), so that it could trigger a native PVA topic directly. And since these buttons are not blocking other input, all the user input will go through the PVA NLU and end up at the configured topic.

Coming from Azure bot development, I had a great experience using PVA together with Bot Framework Composer. There are some small refinements that need to be made, but I am confident that these will be handled soon. Some of these issues have been logged publicly on GitHub, where the team is very responsive.

Hopefully this inspired you to have a look at Power Virtual Agents, but more importantly to look behind the current supported functionality of Power Virtual Agents in customer scenarios. Composer can help you to unblock advanced scenarios and to go live with a great PVA solution.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them here as a comment. What would you use Bot Framework Composer for?

Documentation: Extend your bot with Bot Framework Composer