Section 1: An Introduction to Power Virtual Agents
In this section, you will start to get familiar with Power Virtual Agents, what the agents are, how they can provide value to an organization, and what the licensing requirements are, as well as building your first automated bot.
This section contains the following chapters:
- Chapter 1, Introducing Power Virtual Agents
- Chapter 2, Licensing for Power Virtual Agents
- Chapter 3, Building Your First Power Virtual Agent Chatbot
Chapter 1: Introducing Power Virtual Agents
Welcome to a new adventure. You might have encountered various incarnations of chatbots over the years but not even realize what they are or how they work. This book is about to change all of that.
This is not a new topic or a fashionable episode in technology that will fade away. The time is now to start adopting these capabilities and putting your organization on the path to success.
In this chapter, we will focus on a historical overview of chatbots. We will be touching on the following:
- What is a chatbot?
- What is Power Virtual Agents?
- How does Power Virtual Agents add value?
- How does licensing work for chatbots?
Grab a coffee and let's get going.
What is a chatbot?
Chatbots, or simply bots for the context of this book, are not something new. They are almost as old as the internet. Of course, they evolved at different stages, taking various shapes and forms.
At a high level, the definition of a bot is a piece of software, or an application, that performs an automated task or set of tasks.
Way back in the beginning, chatbots were doing this by running a script or a set of scripts. This is nothing more than automating a set of commands.
If you think about it, it is pretty obvious how this would be valuable. It has been recognized that when dealing with repetitive tasks, leveraging a bot can not only take some of the workload from humans but also perform these tasks much faster and much more accurately.
This might sound familiar to those of us who have looked at how the personal computer was born. Not only have chatbots been around for almost as long as the personal computer, but they are now as important and prevalent as the personal computer, as we will see when we look at internet traffic consumption later in this chapter. As a matter of fact, the Encyclopedia Britannica defines a computer as a device for processing, storing, and displaying information (https://www.britannica.com/technology/computer).
But let's take a step back in time and look at some history. Bear with me here; this will set the necessary context for where we are going.
A condensed history of bots
The internet took shape in the 1970s. But it only caught the attention of the general public in the early 1990s. So, when I mentioned in the introduction that bots are almost as old as the internet, I was not lying.
Some of the first appearances of bots can be traced back to 1988. Yes, you read that right. Their preferred cradle at the time was a network called Internet Relay Chat (IRC). For those of us with gray hair, or no hair left at all, this will be familiar. We used to spend entire nights exchanging information and finding things out, reading documentation and other materials shared, among other things. Various servers were powering different networks with multiple channels, some more friendly or interesting than others. Funnily enough, IRC is still around; you can always poke around and find out more about it.
Those early bots provided all sorts of automation in a channel. From keeping a channel active, recognizing users, and providing them with moderator or administrator status, to responding to specific commands and even returning automated messages or documents, they were ubiquitous in that space.
As a matter of fact, they were extremely important. Due to the nature of IRC, a bot was always used by an established channel in order to keep the channel open and to prevent malicious users from taking over that channel. At the time, these kinds of bots were run from machines with long uptimes, typically running some version of BSD or Linux.
As they started to show true value, they started to become more refined and to escape the confines of IRC. They also started to separate functionality. Some bots are designed for the repetitive execution of tasks, while others are more inclined toward conversation. And that's how chatbots were born.
Some of the first incarnations of bots outside of IRC though were in fact web crawlers. To be more specific, the first such bot was called WebCrawler, and it was created in 1994. It went from AOL to Excite. But the most famous web crawler was created in 1996. It was named BackRub and was later renamed Googlebot.
Important note
To find out more about BackRub, take a look at the following link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#BackRub.
But bots have not always been used for a good cause, as we will see in the next section.
Malicious use of chatbots
As bots became recognized for their power and usefulness, they started to catch the attention of various malicious groups. Just like everything on the internet, they started to take on a life of their own, varying based on the group that adopted them.
Besides the obvious valid and good use cases, bots started to be adopted and used for malicious use cases. Having the ability to perform a large set of actions in an automated way was appealing to all.
Between the years 1999 and 2000, several incarnations of malicious bots and botnets (groups of bots working in conjunction) started to appear, for which people were unprepared. Some of these activities started through IRC but then expanded into the wild.
The year 2007 brought us one of the largest botnets at the time, called Storm. It was estimated that the botnet infected 50 million computers. There were various programmed use cases and scenarios leveraged in the attack. While negative in its intended use, it did show that bots can really scale.
Some of these use cases include actions such as sending large numbers of spam emails, identity theft, unauthorized distribution of malware, DDoS attacks, bots for artificially increasing traffic and revenue on advertising, game cheating bots, and many more.
But it is not all bad, so let's shift gears and fast forward a little.
Fast forward to today
What we know and use today on the internet was shaped in great part by bots. Starting with the assistance provided on various IRC channels, or the web crawlers that put information at the fingertips of users, bots evolved into indispensable tools for many business use cases. The ability to automate processes, as well as the power to interact with bots through normal conversation, became an indispensable tool. As technology evolved, so did the capacity of bots. We can now create smarter, faster, and better bots. Bots assist us in doing our day-to-day activities, assist our customers, and provide a differentiator for businesses that adopt and use them wisely. The current business landscape has evolved to leverage bots at scale.
In fact, bots are currently adopted so much that some statistics show that out of today's web traffic, roughly half is bot-generated traffic. As technology evolves, exponential bot traffic growth is expected. This will be driven by technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) and the ability to implement conversational scenarios through natural language processing.
Let's just look at the Turing test, developed in the 1950s. It was meant to test the ability of a machine to have a conversation with a human in an indistinguishable manner from a normal conversation between two humans.
As AI-infused conversational chatbots have taken shape, their uses have extended into various scenarios, including the following:
- Messaging applications, either as part of websites or baked into various applications.
- Marketing platforms with a focus on external customers and potential customers.
- Company internal platforms focused on serving internal users and employees.
- Customer service scenarios targeted at helping existing customers.
- Healthcare scenarios for scheduling appointments, locating services, or providing basic medical information.
- Toys are getting smarter, with educational scenarios for various ages.
Chatbots are used in many other sce...
