Beta Testing with Google and Amazon

Google Needs to Catch Up to Amazon with Beta Testing

We at Voice2Biz use Amazon’s skill beta test program mechanism to beta test the skills we build for you.

Amazon has the customer in mind and makes it very easy to add and manage beta testers. Simply give Amazon the list of beta email addresses and Amazon takes care of the rest. You can use any email address that is associated with an Alexa device. Amazon sends the tester an invite email and makes it easy to join the testing.  Simple and effective.

Actions on Google beta testing? Nada.

Google still has no clue in this area as to what it takes to bring an Action to market through a real product process (or refuses to care). They have “testing”, but they don’t have Actions *beta* testing; they have *alpha* testing for other developers.

In order to add others to help test your Google action, they MUST have a gmail account because Google effectively uses the Google development console as their way to test. There is no automated invite to your beta testers.

Once you add testers via read-only development permissions, you have to manually copy and email a link to them. The tester then has to follow the link, manually toggle the action’s Test Status to “Active” and then click “Start”. Again, all this happens in a convoluted (for the uninitiated) Google developer console.

To top things off, whenever you invoke an action in test, Google prefaces the invocation response with, “Okay, let me get the test version of xxxx”. It does this *every time* you invoke the test action. This causes interesting and considerable grief with our beta testers when they’re trying to run through dozens of invocations.

Google; get your act together.