How to test screenless interfaces – chatbots and voicebots

Bots are booming! The bot market is estimated to reach 3,172 million USD by 2021.
Bots offers unique opportunity to improve the customer experience while cutting costs through automation.

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What are bots?

A bot is a service, powered by rules and artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat or voice interface like Siri or Alexa. Bots could live in any platform – Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Text Messages, etc.

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Why are bots hot right now?

Bots intelligently address customer needs, reduce churn rate, enhance overall experience and increase user engagement with the brand

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Complexity of Validations

In the case of bots, testing challenges are complex as there are multiple factors that need to be considered such as: Intent Validation, Response Validation and Integration Validation etc. Here we’ve shared our top five considerations for your bot test automation strategy

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Focus on flexibility and interoperability

Use an Automation Library that resides as part of the application package and enables tests to be configured without code level changes. It should be controlled by a back-end interface, be modular, flexible and should scale up to accommodate more interfaces in the future.

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Automate, automate, automate

Over-reliance on manual will ultimately drag the team down as use case complexity continues to rise. If you are unsure about how to increase the level of automation, focus first on repetitive tasks while reserving the most complex functional or flow testing for manual configuration.

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Use quality data flows

An important piece of the puzzle in bot automation is creating data flows that mimic the interactions for your bot. Test data flows can be easily created in Excel or Mind Map, which are later “read” by the bot automation framework.

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Mix n match approaches

Headless test automation is a familiar paradigm in mobile and web circles, and can be used successfully for faster testing of bots intended for multiple platforms. By contrast, the “imitating user’s actions” approach allows enterprises to test the bot’s flow end-to-end. This is great for testing the user experience with specific UIs.

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Voice adds complexity

Interpreting language is a step up in difficulty, so keep in mind that voice interface automation requires additional test layers to incorporate pre-recorded speech or a Text-to-Speech (TTS) API simulator.

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In a Nutshell

• Focus first on repetitive tasks while reserving the most complex functional testing for manual configuration.
• Embrace automation using an automation library
• Create data flows that mimic the interactions for your bot.
• “Imitating user’s actions” approach allows you to test the bot’s flow end-to-end
• Add test layers to incorporate pre-recorded speech or a Text-to-Speech (TTS) API simulator

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Learn More

If you have plans to introduce bots into your digital initiative soon, or you’re currently experiencing rollout challenges, why not get in touch?
Take advantage of our free consultation today
Get a Free Consultation

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