Debugging Conversations

As we have developed apps with Violet we have found easy support for debugging to be extremely important.

Testing Your Logic

When developing conversational scripts - it helps to debug and test it in three phrases:

1. Make sure the code compiles/runs. You can do this by starting the code - i.e. typing npm start, fixing any errors, and keeping on re-starting it until misplaced punctuations and declaration have been fixed.

2. Test the script in the included tester view. You can do this by running the script and opening it in a browser, for example: http://localhost:8080/ You will likely want to submit IntentRequest’s based on the available utterance’s. When you do, you would submit a request and then you should ideally verify that the response output SSML is per your needs. Additionally, it is helpful to walk through the script a few times to ensure that the application supports the different user scenarios.

3. Once the script works locally, you will likely want to deploy it to the cloud and configuring Alexa and/or Google Dialogflow to talk to the underlying skill. At this stage you will benefit from testing by iterating rapidly with: invoking the voice-client, examining the conversational-app’s logs, and tweaking the utterances in the respective web-consoles.

Debugging Flags

Violet supports setting the DEBUG environment variable to help in figuring out problems (using the npm debug module). Some main parameters that you can use include:

• warn:conversationEngine and warn:flowScriptCompiler - flags potential problem areas, i.e. things that are uncommon but do make sense in a few areas.
• engine:convo, engine:output, and engine:response - key runtime messages (as requests come in and responses go out).
• flowScriptCompiler - specific message while compiling the Conversational Flow Language.
• googlePlatform and alexaPlatform - messages when registering intents with the platform plugins (not commonly used).
• alexaAPI and googleAPI - messages when requests come in and go back out from the Amazon Alexa and the Google Dialogflow endpoint.

In general it is helpful to enable the warn:* and engine:* settings when running your voice app - you can do this by typing: DEBUG=warn:*,engine:* npm start.