Test Skills in the Alexa Developer Console

You can use the Test page in the Alexa developer console to test most functionality in a skill, including multi-turn interactions, progressive responses, and entity resolution. It's important to test your skill to make sure that your skill works the way that you expect. The type of testing you do is dependent on the voice interaction model for your skill type. You can use the Alexa app during testing. The Alexa app shows published skills, as well as your own skills under development.

Before you can test your skill, you must configure the minimum required data for the skill type in the developer console and deploy the code for your cloud-based service. For more details, see Build Skills in the Alexa Developer Console.

Enable your skill for testing

When you're ready to test the skill, complete the following steps to enable your skill for testing:

  • Navigate to the Test page.
  • If you haven't enabled testing for this skill, locate the Test is disabled for this skill option with the drop-down selection set to Off. From the drop-down list, select either Development or Live as your skill testing stage.
  • If you have already enabled testing, from the Skill testing is enabled in list, select either Development or Live as your skill testing stage, or select Off to disable testing.

A skill can be in one stage at any time. For example, enabling your skill for testing in the live stage, disables your development skill for testing. Your live skill continues to be available in the developer console, SMAPI, ASK CLI and any devices signed in to your developer account. As part of this enablement in the developer console, the page redirects to the live stage URL and resets all session and context information. If you have any information that you want to preserve, save it before you proceed. This activity generates a new user ID and lets you simulate a first-time user experience. If you configured your live skill with a live Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda version, this stage of enablement uses that live Lambda version.

Test tools

The Test page provides three tabs in the left pane for different types of testing.

Tab Description

Alexa Simulator

Use the simulator to interact with a custom or smart home skill with either text or your voice. To enable testing of the dialog flow, the simulator maintains the skill session with your skill like a device does. The simulator also sends the cards that your skill returns to the Alexa app the same way a device does. If your skill supports multiple languages, select the language that you want to test from the drop-down list. For details, see Test your skill in the simulator.

Manual JSON

Use manual JSON to enter a JSON request directly and see the JSON response that your skill returns. This option doesn't maintain the skill session and is similar to testing a JSON request in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda console. The Device Display and Device Log simulator options aren't supported for Manual JSON.

If your skill supports multiple region-specific endpoints, you can select the endpoint to use in testing. Navigate to the list near the bottom of the page to change endpoints.

Voice & Tone

Enter plain text or SSML to hear how Alexa speaks the text. Select the language you want to hear from the list at the bottom of the page. All supported languages are available in this list, even if your skill doesn't support them.

Test output

To view the output of your testing, in the right-pane toggle any of the following options.

Option Description

Skill I/O

In the Skill Invocations pane, you can view the JSON input and output of each request and response.

Device Display

In the Device Display pane, you can see how the content looks on an Alexa-enabled device with a screen. Replay the Alexa response to see the content that Alexa displays at the same time. To change the display size, select a device from the drop-down.

This options isn't available for Manual JSON testing.

Device Log

View the events sent to Alexa and the intents and directives sent to your skill during skill interaction. This options isn't available for Manual JSON testing.

Personalization

For custom skills that include personalization features, you can create user profiles to test different permission configurations and toggle consent. For more details, see Test Personalization.

Smart Home Test

Run automated tests for smart home skills that use the common Alexa interfaces. For more details, see Use the Smart Home Test Tool.

Smart Home Debugger

View events that your smart home skill sends to Alexa. For more details, see Use the Smart Home Debugger.

Disable your skill for testing

If you have multiple versions of your skill with the same invocation name, even if a version is hidden or removed, you must disable the versions that you don't want to test to avoid unexpected launch responses.

To disable a skill for testing

  1. Sign in to the Alexa developer console.
  2. From the skill list, under STATUS, locate the version of your skill that you want to disable, and then, in the dropdown under ACTIONS, select Test.
  3. If you have already enabled testing, from the Skill testing is enabled in list, select Off to disable testing. The console displays Test is disabled for this skill option with the drop-down selection set to Off.
  4. Repeat the previous steps for each skill version that you want to disable.
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Last updated: Mar 20, 2024