Testing Alexa Skills without a physical device
The significant adoption rate of voice-enabled assistants makes it tempting for developers to enter the conversational interfaces business and start developing apps (called “Skills” in Alexa and “Actions” in Google Home) for such devices.
Costs, distribution and privacy concerns can sometimes get in the way and become a deal-breaker, but viable options are available to emulate an Echo device using a browser or a mobile phone:
Built-in Test Simulator
The Amazon Developer console features a built-in Test Simulator that takes as input text messages, audio (voice) and raw JSON. It is a good starting point, especially during the early development stage.
Echosim.io
Echosim.io is an in-browser Alexa emulator that works like a charm. You will need to log into the service using an Amazon account: this is needed to link your virtual Alexa with your Amazon account, activate the skills and test them. If you are testing a Skill that is not published yet (development phase), you will need to either be the Skill owner (developer) or an authorized beta tester (this applies to all other simulators as well).
Reverb
Reverb is an interesting app that comes in multiple flavours:
The official Alexa app (for Android)
In spite of being official and convenient, I did not put the app at the top the list because of the following issues:
- The voice service is only available on Android at the time of writing (see also here). It’s available on iOS via the Amazon app (not the Alexa one), but I still need to test if it works with development Skills.
- According to some reports, the voice functions might not be available out-of-the-box even in the most recent versions of the app and it’s not clear how they are activated. I have installed the app from scratch a few days after the announcement of the update and still I had not been able to access the new functions until the next day (I have enabled auto-updates, though, so that might be the reason).
How to know if voice functions are enabled
The bottom menu of the app will go from this:
to this:
Hit the blue button in the middle to see the magic tricks.
…or just Bring Your Own Emulator!
If you are looking to build an automated testing system for voice services, you can also implement a custom solution using the Alexa Voice Service SDK or API. Third-party services like echosim.io and reverb.ai are built on this API.
Originally published at www.rockedscience.net on January 24, 2018 and slightly edited for publication on Medium.
