Box 1: Load the extracted topic into a variable

Power Virtual Agents uses entities to understand and identify a specific type of information from a user's responses. When saving the identified information to a variable, a variable type will be associated with it. The variable type is analogous with the entity.

In Power Virtual Agents, a topic defines a how a bot conversation plays out.

A topic has trigger phrases – these are phrases, keywords, or questions that a user is likely to type that is related to a specific issue – and conversation nodes – these are what you use to define how a bot should respond and what it should do.

Box 2: Create a custom entity

The prebuilt entities cover commonly used information types, but on some occasions, such as when building a bot that serves a specific purpose, you'll need to teach the bot's language understanding model some domain-specific knowledge.