Do you feel overwhelmed by your clients’ and employees’ requests? Do you wish you had the resources to pay a hot-shot AI specialist to help you build one of those uber-friendly chatbots, that help you tremendously increase customer satisfaction and create a more articulate customer journey inside your brand?
Worry not anymore! We are here to let you know that the days when artificial intelligence was only niched for very powerful businesses are over! Just at the end of last year, Microsoft launched Power Virtual Agents, a platform that enables almost everyone to build and run their own custom chatbot!
One might wonder what artificial intelligence actually does. The Oxford Dictionary conceptualizes AI as “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”
Alan Turing, the father of AI services, designed a homonymous test to determine whether a machine can be considered intelligent. To do so, a third party must decide which one is the computer and who is the human in a digital text conversation. The impossibility to give an accurate response to the question meant that the computer or machine possesses artificial intelligence.
However, until recently, AI development was only available to highly skilled software developers. Luckily, through the recently launched Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft shifts the paradigm from a very exclusivist methodology to one that enables both developers and end users with the power of automating some of the most requested business services.
In the name of accessibility, Power Virtual Agents provides a no-code environment for bot development, turning the whole process into an end-to-end, no-cliffs building experience.
As stated by Charles Lamanna in an interview preceding the launch of Virtual Agents, the service is “very much focused on […] low code, accessible to anybody, no matter whether they’re a business user or business analyst or professional developer, to go build a conversational agent that’s AI-driven and can actually solve problems for your employees, for your customers, for your partners, in a very natural way.”
However, accessibility does not exclude the usage of code and custom features built from scratch. By integrating Bot Framework and Virtual Agents via the Bot Framework Skills, developers can extend their own coded bots as a skill and allow subject matter experts to update bot conversations.
Moreover, Power Virtual Agents not only facilitates the whole bot building experience, but the result is then available for integration in Teams, Slack, Facebook Messenger, etc.
In the early 1950s, Alan Turing was wondering if machines can exhibit intelligent, human-like behavior. And speaking of humans, one of the most important characteristics of an intelligent being is its learning ability. We are happy to announce that bots designed with Microsoft’s Virtual Agents also learn over time, based on feedback received from users. Therefore, the artificial intelligence created on the platform is truly…intelligent!
We already built our own AI-powered chatbot – Sesame. It is the perfect guide to new employees in their journey in the company and an invaluable member of any HR department. Through a mobile app, Sesame will guide the new team member along the entire on-boarding process.
Although this time we chose a SaaS approach, our amazingly talented team can help your company develop effective and friendly bots using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents.
If you are truly ready to ride the AI wave, drop us a line here and we will take you on one of the most amazing journeys of the decade!
Build the thing .right!
