Reviewing and debugging your actions
Learn how to test the conversation you built into an action, to experience what your users see with your assistant. If there are any issues, learn how to debug the user’s experience.
Using Preview to test your action
As you make changes, test the action at any time to see whether the resulting interaction works as intended. Preview, which is a button on every action page, shows you what customers see when they use web chat to interact with the action.
Before you test your action, make sure you save any new changes, and wait until the system finishes training. If the system is still training, a message is displayed that says so.
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Click Preview. The Greet customer action starts.
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In the chat window, type some text and then press Enter.
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Check the response to see if your assistant correctly interpreted the input, started the intended action, and performed the appropriate step.
The Preview pane names the action that was recognized in the input.
Preview If the assistant doesn't understand a phrase, you see the built-in action
No action matches. -
Continue to converse with your assistant to see how the conversation flows.
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To remove prior test utterances from the chat pane and start over, click the Reset icon. Not only are the test utterances and responses removed, but this action also clears the values of any variables that were set as a result of your previous interactions.
Queries that you submit through the Preview pane generate /message API calls, but they are not logged and do not incur charges.
Saving changes before testing
Preview represents updates from the last time that the assistant was saved.
Changes are saved when you:
- Select the save icon
- Click a new step
- Open Preview
- Reset Preview
To learn more about saving changes, see Saving your actions.
If you make several edits without saving, the preview pane shows a message that you need to save before you test your changes.
Using debug mode in Preview
Preview has a debug mode that you can turn on to see information that helps you understand why the assistant responds or doesn't respond to a particular input.
Debug mode has four tools to analyze your action:
Start and end of an action
The assistant marks the spots in the conversation when a customer enters an input that fits within an action. The assistant also marks when an action completes, and how it completes.
Completion options include ending:
- With an end step
- Without an end step
- With a human agent escalation
- With a search to a knowledge base
Action confidence score
Every input that you enter that can start a new topic shows a confidence score icon. Hover over this icon to see a list of actions with different confidence scores.
These scores represent the assistant’s confidence that the sentence or phrase that you entered can be solved by the steps that are built into a specific action.
The top score in green represents the action with the highest confidence and the one the assistant used.
The remaining two are actions that were considered because of their confidence score, but weren't used because thee confidence scores were lower.
If no action scores higher than 20% confidence, you see the built-in action No action matches.
Step locator
Sometimes you might find an error in the middle of a test conversation, and need to find which step and action is involved. A locator icon next to each assistant response lets you find the associated steps in the editor.
Click the icon, and the editor shows the corresponding step in the background.
Follow along
Follow along connects what you are seeing in Preview with what you built in the action. As you interact with your assistant, the debug mode automatically opens each step in the background. That means you can fix an error as soon as you see it, because the editor is already open to the corresponding step.
Variable values in Preview
As you test your conversation in Preview, you can check that each variable is set correctly. Click Variable values to see the values stored in each variable during the conversation. The Variable values pane has two tabs, one for action variables and one for session variables. If you are using dialog, you can see session variables for both actions and dialog on the Session variables tab.
For better visibility of long variable values, you can expand the width of the debug mode panel by using the Expand icon.
To learn more about variables, see Managing information during the conversation.
Editing the variable values
In the debug mode, you can edit the variable values by clicking on the value that you want to edit. For better visibility of long variable values, you can resize the width of the debug mode panel by using the Resize tab (<). To edit large values for action variables, you can click the Expand button next to the variable value to open the Editor window. The Editor window contains the variable name and the value that is associated with it. You can use the Editor window to edit the variable value.
Extension inspector in Preview
If you are using a custom extension in your action, you can use the Extension inspector in Preview to debug. For more information, see Debugging custom extensions
