chatbot-voice-agent-testinglisted

# Chatbot / Voice / Conversational Agent Testing ## The pipeline to test end-to-end **Input (text/speech) → intent/NLU → reasoning/planning → tool/API call → response generation → output (text/speech)**. Test each stage in isolation first (does STT transcribe correctly regardless of what the agent does with it?), then the full pipeline — isolating stages tells you *where* a failure lives instead of just *that* the conversation went wrong. ## Multi-turn conversation testing - **Context retention**: does the agent correctly reference something said 3+ turns earlier? Test with conversations long enough to exceed casual expectations, not just 2-turn exchanges. - **Context window / memory limits**: what happens when a conversation exceeds the model's context window — does it degrade gracefully (summarize, drop oldest turns intelligently) or does it silently lose critical earlier information (like an established user preference or constraint)? - **Topic switching**: user abruptly changes subject — does the agent follow naturally, or does it awkwardly force the old topic? - **Correction handling**: user says "no, I meant X not Y" — does the agent actually update its understanding, or does it repeat the same mistake? - **Interrupt handling** (voice specifically): user starts speaking while the agent is still responding — does it stop and listen (barge-in), and does it recover the conversation state correctly after being interrupted mid-sentence? ## Intent recognition & entity extr