Yesterday, the Microsoft Ignite 2021 conference was kicked off online. Among the highlights is Power Automate Desktop for Windows 10 users, an RPA service that automates tasks within Windows across various apps. New Power Virtual Agents features were also unveiled.
Power Automate Desktop for Windows 10, which arrives after Microsoft acquired RPA startup Softomotive, provides an attended RPA solution to automate tasks in SharePoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, and third-party business apps. Web and desktop recorders capture steps in automation, and a visual drag-and-drop designer organizes flows logically, with over 370 prebuilt actions that connect to a number of different applications.
In other news, Microsoft revealed a new set of capabilities for Power Virtual Agents, its service that allows customers to create chatbots via a web graphical interface. Bots created with Power Virtual Agents can now learn and improve over time, thanks to AI-driven natural language learning. The bots automatically learn from conversations and improve their ability to parse what’s being said. In addition, AI-driven personalization capabilities allow the bots to use the details the system already has — such as a ZIP code or address — in future chats with the same user. And topic suggestion and AI-driven topic tuning help bot authors discover new subjects to build and improve topic triggering.
