Using the Bot Tester
After creating an intent and training the bot, you'll want to test the bot by sending test messages to see if it's properly detecting intents. The Bot Tester allows you to do this easily and test the capabilities of your new chat bot.
To use the Bot Tester, begin by clicking the Bot Tester tab on the left sidebar menu.
This will navigate you to the Bot Tester dashboard, displayed below.
Testing an Intent
Using the Bot Tester makes it simple to test an intent. Start by sending a message to evaluate your new intent.
For instance, if I have a set of utterances for a particular intent, I'd want to ensure they can accurately recognize semantically similar sentences. This allows chat bot users to phrase the same question in various ways and still get the intended response.
This intent is designed to detect when a user asks to view something called the test intent. On success, it should send back the message "Test!"
I'll test the intent by creating a semantically similar sentence but worded differently, like
"Show me the test intent."
I simply have to send this message inside of the chat field to the left to determine if the intent is detected.
Once I send this (and if it it activates the Test Intent), the window's appearance will change drastically.
Let's break this down:
When activated, my intent is programmed to respond with a "Test!" message in the conversation. Evidently, the phrase "Show me the test intent." triggered it, as we received that response.
On the next screen to the right, we can see a menu – but it doesn't look very familiar.
The Bot Tester allows you to test the effectiveness of a single intent. By default, the Bot Tester automatically selects the most recent message – in this case, an automatic intent that we didn't write.
We want to see what happened for our "Test!" message, not the end of the conversation. To switch which intent you are testing, simply click it's message. The selected intent will glow with a golden border after being clicked.
Now, the next screen should be displaying the correct information.
From here, it is very simple to test out the flow of the intent that you have created. Simply click through each step on the Timeline, and each step will be outlined on the Flow visualization on the right.
