Testing is not optional — it is one of the most important steps in building a reliable AI assistant. No matter how well you have written your system prompt, real conversations will always surface edge cases and unexpected behaviors that you did not anticipate. Testing before going live lets you catch and fix these issues in a safe environment, so your callers never experience them.
Live Bots 365 provides a built-in test interface that simulates a real phone call with your assistant. You can type messages as if you were the caller, and the assistant will respond exactly as it would on a live call — including invoking tools, following flow logic, and using its configured voice.
Using the Test Interface
From your assistant's configuration page, click the 'Test' button in the top right corner. This opens a chat-style interface where you can simulate a conversation.
Type your opening message as if you were a caller. The assistant will respond using its configured prompt, voice settings, and tools.
Begin by testing the ideal scenario — the conversation flow you expect most callers to follow. Verify that the assistant achieves the intended goal (e.g., books an appointment, answers the key question) without errors.
After the happy path works, test difficult scenarios: callers who go off-topic, callers who ask questions your assistant does not have answers to, callers who are rude or uncooperative, and callers who provide incomplete information.
If your assistant has tools, verify that they trigger at the right moments. Check that the correct parameters are being passed and that the tool responses are being used correctly in the conversation.
After each test session, review the full transcript. Look for any responses that feel unnatural, incorrect, or off-brand, and use those findings to refine your system prompt.
Test Scenarios to Cover
Use this checklist as a guide for comprehensive testing. The more scenarios you cover before going live, the more confident you can be in your assistant's performance.
| Scenario | What to Verify |
|---|---|
| Ideal caller path | Assistant achieves the primary goal smoothly and naturally. |
| Off-topic questions | Assistant handles gracefully without going off-script. |
| Caller asks to speak to a human | Assistant offers to transfer or provides the right escalation path. |
| Caller provides wrong/incomplete info | Assistant asks for clarification rather than proceeding with bad data. |
| Tool invocation | Tool fires at the right moment with correct parameters. |
| Tool failure | Assistant handles API errors gracefully without confusing the caller. |
| Very short responses | Assistant does not misinterpret one-word answers. |
| Caller interrupts the assistant | Interruption handling works as expected based on your sensitivity settings. |
| Call end conditions | Assistant ends the call appropriately when the goal is achieved or when the caller wants to hang up. |
Making a Live Test Call
After passing the text-based test interface, we strongly recommend making at least one live test call before launching. Assign your assistant to a phone number and call it from your own phone. This gives you the full experience — including voice quality, response latency, and how the conversation feels in a real phone context. Things that seem fine in text can sometimes feel different when spoken aloud.
Iterate Quickly
Do not aim for perfection before launching. A good assistant that is live and generating real call data will improve faster than a perfect assistant that never ships. Launch when the core use case works reliably, then use real call transcripts to identify and fix the remaining rough edges.