AIMultiple ResearchAIMultiple Research

Top Chatbot Testing Frameworks & Techniques in 2024

Cem Dilmegani
Updated on Jan 11
4 min read
Top Chatbot Testing Frameworks & Techniques in 2024Top Chatbot Testing Frameworks & Techniques in 2024

Business press agrees that there are numerous potential benefits of chatbots. To that end, significant funding has poured into chatbot companies to realize this potential.

But for the latter to materialize, chatbot failures should be minimized. And a good method of ensuring smooth functionality of the chatbots is through chatbot testing.

That is why we have compared the top 7 chatbot testing frameworks, including comprehensive chatbot testing approaches, chatbot testing software and chatbot testing services, for you to take advantage of.

What are important chatbot testing concepts?

Test standardization

Most testing approaches lack standardization, as it is hard to quantify the frequency of conversations that test cases cover, especially before a bot is launched. The aim should be to cover the most likely scenarios thoroughly.

For example, Chatbottest is an open-source project that provides a database of 120 questions to test the chatbot and user experience.

The concept they developed follows a Gaussian nature. The test mechanism developed broadly follows three categories. Expected scenarios, possible scenarios, and almost impossible scenarios. This scenario testing structure can be mapped to sigma distances.

Empirically, after testing for almost impossible scenarios which can be considered as the 3-sigma distance, the chatbot performance would be observed for 99% confidence interval. It would be costly to test further since there is an infinite combination of ways humans can use language.

Areas for testing

Chatbottest provides 7 broad categories for testing:

  • Personality: Does the chatbot have a clear voice and tone that fits with the users and with the ongoing conversation?
  • Onboarding: Are users understanding what is the chatbot about? and how to interact with him from the very beginning?
  • Understanding: Requests, Small talk, idioms, emojis… What is the chatbot able to understand?
  • Answering: What elements does the chatbot send and how well it is doing it? Are they relevant to the moment and context?
  • Navigation: How easy is to go through the chatbot conversation? Do you feel lost sometimes while speaking with the chatbot?
  • Error management: How good is the chatbot dealing with all the errors that are going to happen? Is it able to recover from them?
  • Intelligence: Does the chatbot have any intelligence? Is it able to remember things? Uses and manages context as a person?
  • Response time: Customers want fast responses, faster responses can keep customers more engaged with bots.

For more information about the chatbot testing, feel free to visit our Chatbot testing guide focusing on A/B testing research

What are chatbot testing frameworks to put these concepts to practice?

Framework/softwareSource codeContributors on GithubLast commit on GithubNotes
Botium.atOpen1321/Dec/2020Chatbot test automation
chatbottest.comOpen38/Oct/2018Set of questions to standardize chatbot testing
dimon.coPropriatery
Chatbot test automation. Dimon has integration with major platforms such as Slack, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and WeChat
qbox.aiPropriateryNLP training data optimization
Zypnos.comPropriateryRegression testing for chatbots

What are the limitations of chatbot testing?

Continuous effort is required to ensure that tests remain up-to-date

While standardized tests are crucial, they need to remain dynamic in line with the development of the bot. For example, if we create a test for a specific expression (talk to an operator) to address queries by customers that want to talk to customer service agents, we need to ensure that similar tests in other languages need to be prepared when our bot is launched internationally.

This is a common phenomenon. Goodhart’s law states that once a social or economic measure is turned into a target for policy, it will lose any information content that had qualified it to play such a role in the first place. Therefore, keeping the testing process as dynamic as possible will make the whole testing process more meaningful and would reduce the fragility of the chatbot.

Testing can create a false sense of security

As explained above, static tests lose their relevance over time but a large number of tests, regardless of whether they are up-to-date or not, create a sense of security. However, as tech leaders know quite well, only the paranoid survive.

What are the challenges for chatbot testing?

Multi/cross-channel user experience

Users should be able to communicate with bots seamlessly using different ways such as text, or voice by using various platforms such as desktops, mobile or social media seamlessly switching between channels. However, testing different platforms can be problematic. Chatbots should be able to respond consistently without losing the context and data collected through each channel.

Domain-specific validations

There may be scenarios that a chatbot user needs to help on different topics. For example, a traveler may want to learn the weather conditions and make a reservation for a meal. In this case, a single bot has to switch to different domains. Although using an additional agent bot is a method to fix the problem, this can negatively impact user experience. Therefore, domain switching, which can have numerous combinations, needs to be tested.

Uncertainty of user conversation

Language is ambiguous so testing needs to be context-dependent. For example, the answer to “how will the weather be tomorrow?” will depend on where the user is or whether the user has planned any travel for tomorrow. Therefore, it is not possible to complete chatbot testing by just testing answers with responses. Testing for the understanding of the context is hard but needs to be a part of chatbot testing for truly intelligent chatbots.

For more on chatbots

To learn more about chatbots, read:

Finally, if you believe your business would benefit from a conversational AI platform, we have data-driven lists of chatbot and voice bot platforms.

We will help you choose the best AI partner for your business:

Find the Right Vendors

Sources:

Chatbottest 

Hubspot

Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
Follow on

Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

To stay up-to-date on B2B tech & accelerate your enterprise:

Follow on

Next to Read

Comments

Your email address will not be published. All fields are required.

4 Comments
David Keszeg
Mar 16, 2022 at 16:47

I really enjoyed reading this!
Your bot will be just as good as you train it 🙂 hence why you need to ensure the underlying NLP training data is top-notch!
If you want to understand empirically how your chatbot understands interaction, QBox.ai is the way forward.

Bardia Eshghi
Nov 18, 2022 at 07:19

Hello, David. We’re glad you enjoyed the article. As we’ve mentioned in the article, we believe QBox to be one of the testing frameworks.

Chris Christof
Sep 15, 2020 at 08:40

Excellent post.

You can check out our chatbot testing automation platform which offers test script automation, continuous testing and a AI based rephrasing engine. We are a bunch of QA conversational agent experts and we believe in the chatbot ‘quality’ factor!

Drop us a message if you ‘d like an upgrade 😉

http://www.enchatted.com

Shikha Maji
Aug 16, 2020 at 14:36

Hi,
We have started startup on automate chatbot testing. Our site https://qachatbot.com/, please reach to us if you like to have demo and add our name in the list of provider.

Cem Dilmegani
Aug 16, 2020 at 17:10

Thanks for reaching out!

Amandeep
Jul 06, 2018 at 13:50

Tremendous post,
The Chabot testing methods you have mentioned in the article are really helpful. Thanks for such a great post.

Related research