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The biggest and the most hateful challenge in software development is writing test cases and maintaining them. This is no different when it comes to chatbot development. At Botium we don’t write the regression tests, we generate them. This article shows you how we do this with the least amount of effort invested.

How is it possible to test something for all possible unexpected user behaviour in the future ? How can someone confidently make assumptions on the quality if we have no clue what the users will ask the chatbot ?

One question we hear a lot is “What’s the best way to start testing a chatbot ?” The answer is surprisingly simple: Build up knowledge by educating yourself, and you will be able to answer this question yourself.

Botium Crawler is the newest member of the Botium toolset. It was designed to imitate users going through all the possible combinations of the dialog structure at the same time. It automatically detects all conversation paths for navigating through the whole conversation model.

This article shows how to setup an Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) chatbot in Botium Box.

In the following article we discuss the most important facts to build your “perfect” chatbot.

If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Botium Box offers two methods to test an SMS Chatbot. It can act as a user sending SMS messages, or can interact with the API behind the chatbot. Sending SMS messages looks like an optimal choice because it covers all the stack, but it has a major drawback, the increased costs.

A quick summary of 7 important DO’s and DON’Ts when training an NLP model for a chatbot. They are best applied before starting a project, but can also help to build a mindset for quality training data in all chatbot project phases.

Voice platforms like Alexa and Google Assistant make it easy to provide a custom voice experience to your clients, even without going deeper in audio processing — everything is part of the platform. But what if you already invested quite some effort into building a chatbot on SAP Conversational AI ? You certainly don’t want to switch to a totally new platform now.

A quick summary of 7 important DO’s and DON’Ts when designing a chatbot testing strategy. We are continuously seeing teams ignoring those actually rather simple rules.

This guide suggests best practices, infrastructure and tools to ensure your voice app continues to deliver outstanding user experience.

Voice platforms like Alexa and Google Assistant make it easy to build your own voice experience, even without going deeper in audio processing — everything is part of the platform. But what if you want to rather go for a solution hosted by yourself, running an assistant on your own website, in your own infrastructure ?

“What is the value of testing chatbots?” — A question that hits right in the heart of every passionate tester. It's time to shed some light on this topic.

Botium delivers again — in this case, automated end-2-end testing of WhatsApp chatbots on real or virtual devices. For the first time it is now possible to have a full enterprise-level test strategy for WhatsApp chatbots.

Botium Box 2.8.4 is out now - and it comes with all you need to test your voice applications - audio recorder, voice synthesis, audio effects. And more.

This article is pointing out security threats and attack vectors of typical chatbot architectures — based on OWASP Top 10 and adversarial attacks.

Getting confused with terms like embeddings, utterance similarity, intent separation and cohesion? Gedankenblase Get educated on NLU quality metrics now.

This article shows you how to analyze and evaluate the quality of the training phrases for your chatbot intents with Botium. The purpose of this analysis is to avoid confusing the agent with phrases irrelevant to the intents supplied to, or more relevant to, other intents.

So you decided to add automated testing to your chatbot project ? Good decision 👍! But don't underestimate the effort 😓 in composing a test suite with high test coverage from scratch. Botium Crawler to the rescue.

Botium Box and the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) connector can perform automated testing for Alexa skills – no speaking out loud necessary.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions how to setup Botium Box with Perfecto Mobile and Perfecto Web to run continuous End-To-End tests for a chatbot published on a website.

If you have an existing Watson Assistant skill and you want to analyze it for consistency as well as performance of the training data itself, you should read this article. It shows ways to improve the performance of your skill as well.

This video tutorial shows how to use Botium Box and Botium Coach to evaluate the performance of an NLU model trained with Rasa.

Did you know that it is possible to connect your Google Sheet to Botium Box?

A Selenium Grid is a set of connected Selenium nodes each running your Selenium tests on a different kind of operating system on a different kind of web browser in a different version. We are using docker-selenium to boot our own Selenium Grid on our own server.

This tutorial provides a step-by-step introduction how to use Botium Box to quickly build a regression test suite for an Amazon Lex chatbot and increase the test coverage by adding paraphrases to the test data.

According to the report The State of AI 2019: Divergence there is a lot of Bullshit Bingo around the thing called Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This tutorial shows a way to establish the same methods to chatbot projects, especially for projects focused on training an NLU engine and/or a dialogue engine.

Botium Speech Processing combines the best Open Source speech processing tools in a single service and makes them accessible with a HTTP/JSON API.

Quick installation instructions for running Botium Box (all flavours) on a bare bone AWS Linux server. Same principles apply for all other Linux servers.

Ever wanted to know if your company chatbot would work better on IBM Watson than on Dialogflow ? Or should you give Wit.ai or Amazon Lex a try ? With the help of Botium you can easily benchmark and compare the performance of established chatbot platforms with your own data.

What is a Confusion Matrix ? How to generate and read a Confusion Matrix ? How to calculate precision, recall and F1-Score for your NLU engine ?

This is part 9 of the Botium in a Nutshell series of articles.

So, you followed the installation instructions and you can see the Botium Dashboard, but you don’t know how to start ? Follow the steps in this tutorial to get your first Botium Box test project up and running!

One of the questions we hear the most is how to integrate Botium Box with Jenkins.

We are super excited to announce that Botium Box 1.7 is out now! Discover great new features like Continuous Security Testing based on OWASP ZAP or our brand new Testcase Generator.

This is part 7 of the Botium in a Nutshell series of articles.

This is part 8 of the Botium in a Nutshell series of articles.

Chatbots are cool. They are driving the industry like hardly any other topic these days and are considered to be real game changers.

This is part 6 of the Botium in a Nutshell series of articles.

In the age of agile development, the age of manual regression testing is over. We developed a Botium extension to enable an agile developer team to run automated regression tests on a Microsoft LUIS model within their CI Pipeline.

Testing a Google Action by talking to your device isn’t fun. In the age of agile development, the age of manual regression testing is over. Within 3 days, we developed a Botium extension to enable an agile developer team to run regression tests for a Google Action within their CI Pipeline.

This is part 5 of the Botium in a Nutshell series of articles.

Chatbots are driving the industry. With Botium we are driving chatbots. After months of hard work we are finally there: we are proud to announce the general availability of the newest Botium Stack member, the Botium Box.

Testing an Alexa Skill by talking to your device isn’t fun. Some months ago I published an article showing several options for automating testing of your Alexa Skill:

This is part 1 of the Botium in a Nutshell series of articles.

This is part 2 of the Botium in a Nutshell series of articles.

This is part 3 of the Botium in a Nutshell series of articles.

This is part 4 of the Botium in a Nutshell series of articles.

It’s easy to make a chatbot fail. I am not talking about nonsense input, or input not related to the chatbot domain — literally all state-of-the-art chatbots will fail in these cases. No, I am talking about input making perfectly sense in the domain of the chatbot — simple and short instructions which should trigger one of the main use cases for the chatbot.

Today I was asked to build a proof-of-concept for using Tricentis Tosca to test an Alexa Skill — challenge accepted!