Testing & Debugging

Overview of the tools and process of testing and debugging your NativeChat chabots.

While you develop and make changes to your bot, you need to constantly check how the conversations flow and what happens on user input.

Test console

The NativeChat development portal has a built-in testing console where you can test your bot.

• (A) is the debug output log where you can see detailed information on every user and bot action.
• (B) is the understanding panel where you can check how the bot understands a single user expression.

Debug Log

The console captures and presents a log with detailed information about the events during a chat session - NLP understanding, validation results, webhook responses etc.

Test understanding of single utterances

The Test Understanding panel (B on the image above) is useful when you don’t want to go through your entire conversation flow but only to see which entities are detected in a user expression.

To check the understanding, type the example phrase in the input field and check the table (A) with the list of extracted entities and their values. Check the JSON response (B) tab for even more detailed information.

Demo

Here is a video walk-through of the basic testing and debugging tools in NativeChat portal.

Testing in other channels

Check the article on using proxy bots for testing on some of the supported channels

More information

• Developer productivity - article with tips and tricks.
• Training problems check - detect and fix issues with training data.
• Blog post: 5 Handy Tricks for Improving Your Chatbot Understanding with NativeChat - Introduction to testing and debugging NativeChat bots.