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Preview Feedback: Speech Testing?

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Posted on by Community Power Pla...

Hi, we have been looking forward to the PVA preview release for quite a while. We were highly interested in the voice channels, but it seems that very little is being mentioned about that feature.

The conversation builder UI shows a place to enter "Speech", but how do we test this? It doesn't seem possible to test any of the voice features. Can anyone shine a light on this?

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HenryJammes on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

Native telephony integration had indeed been presented as part of the initial release announcement and materials back in May 2022 but it is no longer part of this release. The related plans have been removed from the 2022 release wave 2 in August 2022.

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.

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)

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Hi @HenryJammes , thanks for responding. That is a pretty massive pivot for the PVA product. Much talk was made about the multi-channel voice and text ability of PVA. We waited to build our product for that reason, but it seems that was not a good decision.

Is native speech as it was originally presented coming in the next release wave? Or, is it being permanently removed? Perhaps you can share a little more about why it was removed from this release.

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HenryJammes on at

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Speech design remains in scope (with SSML support, etc.). It is just natively connecting to the ACS telephony that has been shifted.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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@HenryJammes Got it, thanks. Sounds like we could move forward with developing our product and make use of the SSML areas to allow an external interface to make use of that information for voice.

Can you shine some light on if we are able to develop our own extension or custom code to interface with ACS? Is there anything that would restrict us from doing that with a Bot Framework Composer expansion? We would prefer to not start using Dynamics 365 Omnichannel (or third party Audio Codes) just for the PVA voice expansion if we were able to develop an integration ourselves.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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@HenryJammes Friendly follow up on this. 🙂

I am mostly curious if it's possible for us to hire a developer that can develop a native connection to ACS from PVA using some supported Microsoft development method. Any additional information on this front would be greatly appreciated.

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HenryJammes on at

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Thank you @Anonymous for the friendly follow up!

So, I discussed this in more details with some colleagues, and a crucial piece of integration over a voice channel is real-time access to the audio stream. Call Automation in Azure Communication Services, currently in preview, can potentially offer some of the required capabilities and events, but I'm unsure if offers real-time access to the audio stream to do the Speech-To-Text and Text-To-Speech.

On the PVA side, whether you use AudioCodes or any custom integration, you would integrate with Direct Line: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-virtual-agents/publication-connect-bot-to-custom-application#use-direct-line-to-communicate-with-the-bot.

PVA doesn't natively support Direct Line Speech but you could leverage it by opting for a "relay bot" / "skill" approach.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Thanks @HenryJammes for the response.

One option we discussed internally was possibly going the Dynamics 365 Omni Channel route, but only use the PVA voice bot features. I suppose this would give us native telephony and access to PVA, even if we don't use any of the other Dynamics 365 features.

Can you comment on if that approach is the recommended way to go for native IVR solutions with PVA moving forward, or is it just that the native PVA telephony is coming in a later release wave?

We are looking to build our solution on a platform that can support 50k-80k telephony calls per month. We want to ensure that whatever option we choose can be supported, maintained and (hopefully) made better over-time. This is why we would rather not build our own voice bot functionality to PVA stand-alone if it's coming in the near future from Microsoft.

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HenryJammes on at

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I can't really comment on timelines. We have customers using both.
In terms of volumes we just published a customer story about Rabobank who handles up to 30,000 daily calls that use PVA as the IVR and using AudioCodes: https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/1571328090497733071-rabobank-banking-power-platform

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Community Power Pla... on at

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@HenryJammes thanks for the additional information. After discussing it with the team, we have decided to go with Dynamics 365 Customer Service Omnichannel Voice, just so we can have a "native" telephony integration that can be fully supported without additional custom services. Our understanding is that we will purchase one Dynamics 365 license, followed by purchasing several Power Virtual Agent Capacity Add-On licenses.

Can you provide some clarification about if Dynamics 365 Omnichannel Voice is supported in the current preview? This URL appears to indicate it's not supported - just trying to figure out if we can start developing on the Unified Canvas yet.

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HenryJammes on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

You'll find more information on voice for customer service here:
Voice channel in Omnichannel for Customer Service | Microsoft Learn
FAQ about the voice channel | Microsoft Learn
Integrate a Power Virtual Agents bot | Microsoft Learn

Pricing information is available here:
Customer Service Pricing | Microsoft Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

The new Power Virtual Agents unified authoring canvas currently doesn't support Omnichannel for Customer Service chat or voice integrations and we can't share ETA for this yet, so I would advise to start on the current version PVA and assess upgrading your bots once this becomes available.

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