Voice Bot Testing

Introduction

The art of testing can be complex—it’s no secret that failure can wreak havoc on an otherwise lovely communication. Testing is an essential enabler for the success of Virtual Conversational Assistants(Voice Bots). Customers nowadays prefer connecting commercial Bots or mobile applications for automated self-service solutions rather than interacting with in-person connections to resolve simple issues like managing personal account information or canceling an order. So Voice bot testing also becomes essential.

This is what voice bots tend to offer in the changing technology landscape. They provide us the flexibility to answer our questions or queries using voice commands. The latest technological development in customer experience and service is all about the use of voice bots to get things done in a real quick time.

Let us try and understand the fundamentals related to voice bots and their associated testing and why organizations need to perform voice bot testing to achieve their business goals and objectives by improving the overall customer experience.

Table of Contents:

• What is Voice Bot?

• What is Voice Bot Testing?

• How to Perform Voice Bot Testing?

• Benefits of Voice Bot Testing

• Challenges with Voice Bot Testing

• Wrap-Up – What the future will bring?

What is Voice Bot?

A voice bot is a conversational robot that works on the principle of conversational artificial intelligence. Voice bots act similarly to chatbots when answering questions or directing us to another person, but they do it by listening to our voice instructions. Although chatbots are currently the most prominent AI communication tool, voice bots are quickly catching up and gaining a lot of recognition. Some of the best-known voice bots are Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa, which have completely transformed the overall customer experience. Voice bots are used in a variety of industries for day-to-day tasks. Some of them are:

1. Voice bot in banking: One of the most crucial factors to take into account in banking is privacy. Customers may feel more at ease asking an intelligent voice bot to answer all of their inquiries without giving anyone on the phone access to their confidential financial information. Voice chatbots enable customers to have private, encrypted discussions in natural language while receiving the most up-to-date information without sacrificing speed, clarity, or privacy.
2. Voice bot in call centers: Support-related inquiries never stop coming into call centers. Every day, they receive thousands of calls, most of which are about routine problems or don’t call for assistance from a human. By driving the end-to-end resolution cycle, voice AI can assist overworked agents. The majority of what a contact center can accomplish can be done by a speech AI.
3. Voice bot in Gaming: Another great application for voice artificial intelligence is in games. A voice bot may assist with gathering feedback, let users report errors, and even let users do in-game tasks by speaking to the voice AI. Voice artificial intelligence in gaming is giving players across the globe amazing, immersive experiences.
4. Simple ticket assignment: Voice AI can help us assign tickets more efficiently. Most incoming support questions can be easily resolved by our voice chatbot. Complex and urgent issues can be smoothly transferred via our voice bot. This can shorten the average handling time (AHT) and conserve resources and working hours for our team.

Voice bots and chatbots are both types of conversational artificial intelligence that can communicate with users. However, voice bots use voice channels for communication, while chatbots use text-based channels within a website or application. Because of this difference, voice bots have two additional capabilities that distinguish them from chatbots:

• Voice Recognition: It assists in converting the user’s spoken language into a string of text-based phrases that is likely to be processed by a chatbot-like engine.
• Speech Synthesis: The bot can then translate the required responses back into spoken English to transmit the answer orally.

What is Voice Bot Testing?

We understood the basics related to Voice Bots and the role played by them in improving the overall business growth and customer experience. Voice bot testing is all about making sure that the voice bot is behaving and responding to different user requests or queries with utmost precision. This is tested using different inputs and allowed permutations to ensure that the voice bot is showing exceptional performance and responding to user requests correctly. Voice bot testing is making sure:

• Overall end-user experience improves in the long run
• Customer requests or queries are answered correctly. If the request or query is not properly answered, provide an alternate path to the user for a quick resolution.
• The output is provided keeping in mind the input conditions and required system dependencies. The following tests are applicable when we are performing voice bot testing:
• ASR (automatic speech recognition) or STT (speech-to-text)
• AI (Artificial intelligence)
• Conversation’s scenario
• TTS (text-to-speech)

How to Perform Voice Bot Testing?

Many voice bots are not well-tested, and most of them do not understand user intent. That is why it becomes important to perform the right testing of the voice bots keeping in mind the end user needs and overall system functionalities.

We can use the following ways to test our voice bot:

• Using a Simulator: This is a great option when we want to test our voice bot on our own or with a small set of users. We can use a simulator to test how the voice bot behaves when different inputs are provided. We can also define different scenarios to gauge the overall performance of our voice bot.
• Using a Platform: If we are planning to perform testing of our voice bot with a larger group of people, we can rely on specialized platforms such as Dialogflow or IBM Watson. These platforms provide flexibility where we can test our voice bot with a real set of users and get feedback on the overall performance.
• During Deployment: We can test the voice bot once it is deployed on a standalone platform such as Google Cloud. Once it is deployed and used by customers, we can then track its usage and performance over time. The feedback shared by customers helps us to make more informed decisions when it comes to testing and overall implementation.

Benefits of Voice Bot Testing

Bots incorporate numerous functionalities and adapt quickly to meet changing customer and market demands. The benefits of testing a bot are ensured by a number of aspects, including:

• Helps to Improve Overall Customer Engagement
  Voice bot testing ensures that overall customer engagement tends to improve in the long run as customer wait time tends to reduce when a voice bot is thoroughly tested and verified.

• Improves Overall Productivity
  Voice bots that are tested using different permutations and combinations can be used in a large number of ways for improving the overall productivity of the project teams. This means that we can achieve our business goals and objectives with highly productive teams that are self-motivated to get things done.

• Helps to Promote Seamless Communication
  Voice bots once properly tested can provide a classic way for customers to contact us for new business opportunities or growth. This means that we are not required to rely on other communication mediums when our voice bot can handle the existing communication requirements.

Challenges with Voice Bot Testing

With benefits, some challenges come along the way when performing voice bot testing. Some of the prominent ones are:

• Understanding the testing scope and requirements when working with multiple accents or dialects as they may behave differently under different circumstances. It becomes equally challenging for the testing team to execute testing requirements when working on iterative releases since complex customer requirements need to be translated quickly.
• The testing team needs to be aware of the latest cutting-edge technologies so that they can easily implement them.
• Voice bot testing can be executed with precision when the right training is provided to different project teams when it comes to implementation and execution.
• It requires seamless collaboration between different teams to perform voice bot testing.
• It requires extensive research when it comes to choosing the right platform, app, and technology for voice bot testing.

Wrap-Up – What the future will bring?

We observe that AI is constantly getting better. And we may anticipate that it will help the economy for years to come. We can be confident that speech bots are here to stay given the constantly changing ecosystem of voice search and voice assistants.

Voice Bots will interact with us more like humans in the future. Voice bots will be capable of interpreting the speaker’s mood based on emotional signals. These elements will be quite helpful in predicting what users would want and then giving them the proper assistance. That is why Voice Bot Testing is getting a lot of popularity in years to come. The organizations have realized the true potential offered by voice bots in improving the customer experience and there will be a lot of serious focus on streamlining voice bot testing.