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How to add telephony channel for a PVA bot?

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Posted on by DaveSimplifire

I have created a PVA chatbot as "preview" with the intention of adding a voice interface. All looks good - the Text/Speech drop-down Message boxes appears and lets me add SSML tags.

But ... when I have published I don't see a panel for a Telephony channel (as shown in Gary Pretty's video of May 14th).

I tried following the advice in the "Give your Power Virtual Agents a voice with Speech and Telephony" blog of 26th May - I got a new phone number created under Azure Communication services. But there appears to be no way to attach the number to my bot.

Am I missing something? Or is there a simpler war to add voice (which at this stage we just want to use for demo purposes - the demo for the PVA chatbot is working very nicely but voice is our primary focus)?

Any advice will be very welcome.

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HenryJammes on at

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Hi @DaveSimplifire,

Native telephony integration had been presented as part of the initial release announcement and materials back in May 2022, but it is no longer part of this release.
As you can see below, the release plans have been removed from the 2022 release wave 2:

As you can see in the unified authoring canvas in preview, speech design remained in scope (with SSML support, etc.). It is just natively connecting to the Azure Communication Services telephony that was removed.

That said, voice integration with Power Virtual Agents is possible:
Either natively through the voice channel in Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service (built over Azure Communication Services),
Or through 3rd-party AudioCodes Voice AI Connect. There’s a good step-by-step guide to quickly set up AudioCodes integration and test it, in https://aka.ms/PVAInADay, in chapter 16 of the student package. On AudioCodes, we also published a customer story about Rabobank who handles up to 30,000 daily calls that use PVA as the IVR and using AudioCodes: Microsoft Customer Story-Rabobank streamlines and personalizes customer support with AI powered virtual agents.

If native telephony support is important for you in PVA, can I ask that you share more on the business case here? PVA Telephony Channel Support - Microsoft PVA Feature Requests | Product Roadmap (productboard.com)
Product teams look at this feedback to prioritize features in future waves.

Thank you
Henry

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DaveSimplifire 14 on at

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Thanks for this, Henry. I've followed the steps in the link you provided and successfully created a telephone based voice interaction which can used for a demo.

The next step for us is to demo a voice conversation initiated from the web. This is provided in a nice way for the PVA chatbot where the publishing option provides the html for an iframe. Is there a way do the same for the voicechat? We have an interested prospective customer (a large insurance company) and we want to show them the conversation that would embed in their web site.

Thanks

Dave

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HenryJammes on at

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I don't think there is a native capability for this in PVA.
In Dynamics 365, the closest is the callback feature: Use direct callback to manage overflowing queues | Microsoft Learn.
If you continue with your AudioCodes exploration, it looks like Click-to-Call is something they support: Click-to-Call | Reduce toll-free costs, boost sales and Improve CX, the easy way (audiocodes.com).

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