Now, you don’t have to necessarily own an Alexa device to test Alexa Skills. Amazon has just announced a new Test Simulator (Beta) for the same. Calling it the next evolution, Amazon has informed that they have added some new capabilities also alongside expanding the old ones.
According to the official announcement,
“With the new voice input capability, you can validate Alexa’s understanding of the spoken word and how the skill responds. The new device event log shows the directives that are sent to the devices, which allows you to understand how the skill interacts with the device. Additionally, the new dialog style UI pattern helps you keep track of the interaction with Alexa and allows you to click back to previous interaction bubbles to inspect relevant debugging information.”
Not only this, the company has worked on improvements in programmatic automated testing and enhanced the skill-testing API so that it can now support dialog management and entity resolution. However, these enhancements will roll out in the next week. And, the visual display testing capability for Echo Spot will be available from next year; you can start testing your Alexa skill though, using Test Simulator (Beta).