In last post we have discussed about bot authentication to secure the chatbot from unauthenticated users. Now lets see what are the options where chatbot can be hosted. What do you mean by chatbot hosting? Again going back to the same example that we are browsing a portal and suddenly a bot pops up from right bottom of the screen, so that user can interact with the chatbot. This is the opportunity and we can engage the users wherever they go to find the answers like a customer care portal, internal portal, mobile app etc. These are called channels for PVA. Availability of variety of channels are the opportunities for you to connect with users to solve their problems or interact with your brands.
PVA gives lot of options to host the bot as shown in below snippet
Out of these various channels, mostly used in projects are the Microsoft Teams, Custom websites, Mobile app. Demo Website is generally used for testing, anybody can use this link for testing purpose.
Lets take a deep dive in the Microsoft Teams channel. Here the bot would be available in the Teams and as any other user who is using teams, we can chat with the bot directly from Teams. I think this is most efficient for internal users who use Teams most of the times during the day. Here we can even see the history of our last conversation. Obviously its based on the Teams policies to store the conversations.
In PVA Manage->Go to Channels and select Microsoft Teams as shown in below snippet and then click on Turn on Teams
It will open the popup as shown below. We have to first click on Edit details In case we want to disconnect the Teams, we can click on Disconnect from Teams anytime
In Edit details, we can change the icon, change the colors etc. Provide short and long description and click on Save We can check the checkbox for to allow users to add this bot to a team.
After saving the settings, we can select the setting where we want users to see this bot. if we want to show this ot to everyone in the organization, this needs approval from the Teams Administrator. Lets select this option
Click on the Submit for Approval button
It would confirm if we really want to so and if we click on Yes, this app would be submitted for approval to Teams Administrator
If its in Trial instance and as admin, we can go ahead and approve the app as mentioned in below steps
Search for your app, select and click on Allow.
Click on the App and then click on Publish , it will again confirm and then publish the App
Now our app /our chatbot is available in Teams Apps, we can search and add it to our teams
We can chat with the bot in the Teams 😀.
We have seen the deployment channels of the PVA and went in depth of Teams channel. Hope you find this posts helpful.
Enjoy chatting with the newly created bot in Teams.
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