How to add a custom trigger phase in Greeting topic in Power Virtual agents Chatbot

I have been working a lot on Power Apps and Power Automate since few years now. And never really got a chance to work with Power Virtual agents in a real time project.

And finally got a chance. And with that came the opportunity to write this blog.

If you have worked on Power Virtual agents you are aware that the two most important components of Power Virtual agents are

  • Topic
  • Entities

Of them Topic are what that drive your conversation. For example when a customer say hello to a bot, what the bot shall reply depend on what the topic it matched. Fortunately we don’t need to start from scratch.

The system provide with custom greeting topic which have 52 pre-defined trigger phases for greeting.

Well, that works great! But how about adding some custom trigger phases in Greeting topic? Like ‘Ola’ or ‘Howzit’. Well that is not possible. Because the system Greeting topic does not allow to add new trigger phases to the existing list of 52 trigger phases.

Do we need to discard this completely? And create our own list of custom greeting.

Well, we can re-use the best of both the worlds. Let’s first go ahead and create a Custom greeting topic. Below I have designed a custom greeting with few trigger phases.

Well that’s good. But how to utilize the system greeting now. You want to re-use the system greeting since there is already a flow defined for that.

It’s actually very easy. Once our custom greeting trigger is matched, we can route to the system trigger. Let’s go to the Authoring canvas and then do the redirect to custom greeting trigger.

For this use the ‘Go to another topic‘ option and use the system trigger ‘Greeting‘ as shown in the picture below.

That’s it. All that is needed is to take the Redirect option to take to the system greeting and your bot continues on it’s course.

Hope this helped!

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Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP


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