Bots Testing Bots: From Manual to Automated Testing for Conversational AI
Testing is a crucial enabler for the success of chatbots and voice assistants. Doing it manually requires enormous time and effort. As DevOps and furthermore AIOps grow in importance, automated testing will remain critical to ensure that bots actually do what their designers intend. Unlike traditional software where the application follows a predefined flow, a chatbot runs without any restrictions. Talking to a chatbot has no barriers. Combining this with an unpredictable user behavior, it becomes utmost difficult to verify the correctness of conversational AI. Training data and test sets are infinitely large. In fact, quantity plays a mature role in quality assurance for bots but makes it impossible to test manually. We will tackle the main questions arising: "Why are bots failing", "What and how should you test?" and of course mainly "How can we automate the testing and training". In addition, you will get hands-on experience in running your first automated tests using Botium.
Christoph Börner is an entrepreneur, developer, tester, keynote speaker and drummer. Studied information technology at the Technical University of Vienna and worked in various fields of software engineering. Active member and organizer in the Austrian testing community. Deep interest in artificial intelligence, machine learning and bots from day one. Long before these topics began to revolve the whole industry and have been considered to be the next big thing after the smartphone. Deep friendship with Florian Treml, even after playing in the same rock band for several years :). Starting together the Botium journey in 2018 was just the next logical step. Today we are counting more than 65k users of Botium and can be considered as the first choice for testing conversational AI.