PVA – Yawer Iqbal

Have you tried Power Virtual Agent (PVA)? If not I will strongly recommend to try it now from https://aka.ms/TryPVA.

If you have already tried a basic functional bot, probably it is time to explore a few features further and think about creating a better chat experience. This post discusses a few ways we can try to format and present bot responses in a comparatively rich format.

Let Your Bot Smile

You will not see a button to add smiles in bot replies. But since basically emojis are HTML characters, if we copy a smile HTML code and past in bot response, it will appear as expected in chat 🙂

Hyperlink, Bold and Italic

Probably you have noticed from the above image we can create hyperlinks in chat. Not only hyperlink but other formatting options like bold, italic, bulleted and number lists are also available. These options appear under ‘Show a message’.

Images

As per planned features by mid of this year ability to add images and videos will be available in PVA. Still, until then you can use HTML symbols in chat using same technique as explained in smiles section. Explore the list of around a thousand HTML symbols here.

Create Bot in Other Languages

One of new features coming this year is support of additional languages. Actually, before knowing it I tried creating a bot in “Urdu” language, and it was good to see first Urdu bot: