Originally posted here.

Cyara has unveiled new chatbot testing features with the latest release of Cyara Botium, creating a one-stop solution for comprehensive, automated chatbot testing and assurance.

The release comes just weeks after Cyara announced its acquisition of Botium to solidify its position as the global specialist in CX testing and assurance.

Chatbots continue to experience notable growth driven by the benefits they deliver to businesses and customers alike. However, they're also commonly plagued with problems that include misinterpreting customer intent, delayed or disrupted hand-offs to live agents and security vulnerabilities, Cyara states.

Negative chatbot experiences can have an impact on a brand and result in customer churn. The disconnect between what chatbots generally promise and what they deliver has created the need for solutions that can efficiently test and monitor the performance of chatbots and conversational AI without overburdening teams, the company states.

With Cyara Botium’s holistic testing approach, brands can improve and continuously test the customer chatbot experience across all channels and platforms in all phases of the chatbot development lifecycle.

Cyara Botium also addresses the rise in chatbot data breaches by improving general chatbot security, ensuring compliance with Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) security standards. This results in consistent, quality, secure experiences and, for new bots, shortened time to market.

Cyara Botium offers the following new features and capabilities:

AI-powered data and test generation: Cyara Botium’s new AI-powered data and test generation is built on the world’s largest natural language model. This enables organisations to create relevant examples of intents and utterances in order to thoroughly train and test their chatbots. This feature improves the efficiency of chatbot teams, requiring minutes to generate new intent phrasing to the chatbot - an otherwise long, manual process that can take weeks to collect data from various sources.

By using the largest pre-trained language model through Cyara Botium, customers can save AI-generated topics as new intents - thereby improving the chatbot’s ability to understand what the user is trying to achieve, the company states.

Extended performance testing: Cyara Botium has enhanced the scalability of its performance testing by increasing the capacity of parallel test executions so that chatbot development teams can stress test by simulating very high volumes of interactions.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Channel and Voice Testing: The new release of Cyara Botium introduces two new test types. Users can now test bots in the IVR channel, ensuring they perform effectively as part of an IVR experience by generating calls that mimic real-time customer interactions. Users can also now conduct voice tests to ensure voicebots perform well in all environments, including mobile devices and browsers. Both of these new features ensure problems are unearthed well before they occur in production.

Christoph Brner, senior director of digital at Cyara, says, “It’s without question that chatbots are delivering benefits to businesses, but it’s imperative that organisations also realise that negative chatbot experiences can lead to chatbots hurting the business more than they help.

"Cyara Botium has already been a prominent market leader in testing conversational AI and is well ahead of the market needs. The innovative features introduced in this release reinforce our leadership, setting us even further ahead of any competition.”

Additional new features include multi-language General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) testing for compliance with European Union (EU) security protocols, customisable reporting templates that appeal to any stakeholder and Single Sign-On (SSO) user authentication.