Low-code from frontend to backend: Connecting conversational user interfaces to backend services via a low-code IoT platform

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. This is the author's version of the accepted version of the paper. It is posted here for your personal use. The final published version of the paper is in CUI'21 3rd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, July 27-29, 2021, Bilbao (online), Spain. It can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1145/3469595.3469632 1 INTRODUCTION Chatbots offer a means to use services and control smart home devices connected to the web.