Low-code from frontend to backend: Connecting conversational user interfaces to backend services via a low-code IoT platform
This addresses the challenge for developers and businesses in reducing programming effort for chatbot integration, though it is incremental as it builds on existing open-source platforms.
The paper tackles the problem of connecting chatbot frontends to backend services, which currently requires substantial manual coding, by proposing an architecture that uses an IoT platform as middleware, enabling low-code or no-code development of transactional conversational interfaces.
Current chatbot development platforms and frameworks facilitate setting up the language and dialog part of chatbots, while connecting it to backend services and business functions requires substantial manual coding effort and programming skills. This paper proposes an approach to overcome this situation. It proposes an architecture with a chatbot as frontend using an IoT (Internet of Things) platform as a middleware for connections to backend services. Specifically, it elaborates and demonstrates how to combine a chatbot developed on the open source development platform Rasa with the open source platform Node-RED, allowing low-code or no-code development of a transactional conversational user interface from frontend to backend.