Testing Voice Apps - Emerson Sklar, Bespoken

Emerson Sklar is the Chief Evangelist at Bespoken, a company with a popular toolkit for testing and monitoring voice apps. We start by unpacking the fundamentals of testing and the various types, from the unit and end-to-end testing to continuous and usability performance testing.

Emerson talks to us through the product features of Bespoken and how it works. We discover the surprising fact that their system uses text-to-speech to generate audio, which is then fed to a virtual Alexa on the servers to generate a response. They are thus able to modify the input in order to measure what effect that has on the output.

Tuning in, listeners will also learn from case studies involving The Mars Agency and Mercedes, we cover the vital elements of a testing strategy and how it should be approached, and then we look at ways to better understand voice app users through monitoring and analytics. 

We have included a bonus section at the end comprising a run-down of all the tools that we can recommend for the various stages of the voice development process, including prototyping, skill building, coding frameworks, testing, and analytics.

Links from the show:

• Emerson Sklar on LinkedIn
• Emerson Sklar on Twitter
• Emerson Sklar Email
• Bespoken
• Bespoken on Twitter
• The Mars Agency
• Mercedes
• Army Research Laboratory 
• Army Intelligence and Security Command
• Applause 
• Amazon Polly
• Google Cloud Text-to-Speech
• Alexa
• Bret Kinsella on Twitter
• Adobe XD
• Cathy Pearl

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