With AI-driven interfaces transforming the digital ecosystem, industry leaders are leveraging the power of chatbots to offer innovative and customized experiences to their users. However, companies must take care to set up the quality parameters right at the beginning and test them thoroughly, in order to ensure continued success.
Chatbots , driven by artificial intelligence (AI) , are equipped to answer questions by humans by utilizing the advancements in big data and machine learning. For customers, chatbots are a prompt and easy way of communicating with the business, without spending a considerable amount of time reading through documents or waiting for a human interaction. Chatbot interaction is very engaging, and studies have shown that over 50% of users prefer to interact with businesses over chat, rather than calling on a phone number.
For businesses however, the expectation grows because their chat software is expected to respond correctly and interestingly to the questions being posed by the users. A good user experience is dependent on the AI engine and its ability to understand the context of a conversation, including slang and sarcasm. Speech recognition is also an important, albeit difficult area to master for the chat bots.
Use The Right Testing Tool:
Your testing tool should be able to provide you access to smartphones, tablets, desktops and any other IoT devices that are likely to be used by the customers for interacting with your app. Having readily available devices should also be a priority so that you can detect and fix bugs at the earliest. Secondly, you must create test cases right at the launch of the sprint so that you won’t have to do as much manual testing later on.
There are some good automated testing tools that you can use such as Selenium & Appium. Selenium is meant for testing the UI of Android local and hybrid applications as well as mobile web. It can associate with numerous gadgets at the same time and is agreeable with JSON wire convention. Appium is a cross-platform test instrument for hybrid and local iOS applications. It can be synchronized with the testing system, TestNG. Appium can handle Safari on iOS and supports different dialects like Ruby, PHP, Java, Python and Node.
Test its Functions Comprehensively:
Chatbots are designed to respond to both text inputs as well as voice commands. While text inputs can be tested with standard tools in a reliable manner, voice input testing requires a greater degree of scale and coverage.
Chatbots are designed to fulfill specific functions and it is important that the functions be carried out with best performance. To test these functions, you can use mechanisms such as boundary value analysis and equivalence partitioning. It has been seen that the free-form input is a significant challenge for chatbots. For instance, the customer might use slang or grammatically incorrect sentences for a query. To deal with this, you can utilize the services of some alpha and beta users from within your own organization or source them from a community. By utilizing the feedback provided, you can fine tune the chatbot experience. Another important aspect is to check the chabot’s performance by benchmarking it against other similar products in the market.
The following features of chatbots should be tested thoroughly:
Conversation Flow
There are several scenarios that you need to test, to gauge what the functions of the chatbot are supposed to do. For example, if the chatbot is supposed to make an appointment, then you must define the conversation flow. The flow should be such that if the user makes an error and wants to go back to the previous step, the chatbot should be able to process that. Secondly, the replies to user’s queries should be kept logical, engaging and relevant so that the user doesn’t get frustrated. Another important aspect is to keep the message length optimal; neither too short nor too long.
Natural Language Processing Abilities
A chatbot is usually expected to process any kind of messages that are input by the user, such as small talk, curse words or even slangs. It can be a challenge, especially if the chatbot is designed for business-related queries and does not have a deep database for answering irrelevant questions. Some chatbots use rich content such as cards and buttons. You must take care to test all such content and its context as well.
Loading Speed and Error Management
The chatbot should have a good speed of giving out replies to a message. If a chatbot takes an unusually long time to reply, the user is put off and ends the session. The speed of a chatbot should be tested comprehensively with a sufficiently large group of beta users. Another major feature to be tested intensively is the error rate. While errors may occur due to developmental issues, the testing should give out a detailed analysis of errors as well as procedures to repair the incidences. The error messages should be easily understood by the users, along with a proper recourse or escalation matrix being given out at the same time.
Conclusion:
It requires thorough testing to avoid failures in AI chatbots. Testing is not limited to just delivering a response, it also involves checking for the right responses to a text or voice input. Besides that, it is important to check loading speed, latency, conversational flow, natural language processing abilities as well as accuracy of response.
