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.

This is a guest post co-written by Sergio Delgado from YoucanBook.me. In their own words, "YouCanBook.me is a small, independent and fully remote team, who love solving scheduling problems all over the world." At YoucanBook.me, we like to say that we're "a small company that does great things." Many aspects of our day-to-day culture are derived from such a simple motto, but especially a great emphasis on the efficiency of our operations. Although we're far from the first years in which our CTO programmed the entire first version of our SaaS tool, when I joined the company, we were only five developers, of which only three were in charge of backend services, and none were dedicated to it 100%.

You just released a machine learning project. It can be a new product at your start-up, a proof of concept for a client demo, or a personal project that enriches your portfolio. You are not looking for a production-grade site; you want to get the job done. So that a few users can test your product. This post is a follow-up and an update over this previous post, where I introduced raplyrics.eu,

As a principal engineer, you will be responsible for ensuring our backend services are feature complete and support our mobile and web clients. Develops, manages and manipulates complex high volume data from a variety of sources. Develops and maintains infrastructure systems that connect internal data sets; creates new data collection frameworks for structured and unstructured data.

IBM and PlayFab are teaming up to deliver better insights about gamers based on analysis from IBM's Watson artificial intelligence platform. Seattle-based PlayFab provides backend services for connected games on mobile devices and PCs. It provides things game developers need to run their games -- like player data storage, player relationship management, tournaments, in-game commerce, and leaderboards. IBM will take that data, crunch it, and come up with insights that help developers run their games better. It's a new way for IBM to participate in what market researcher Newzoo says is a $91 billion market.

IBM and PlayFab are teaming up to deliver better insights about gamers based on analysis from IBM's Watson artificial intelligence platform. Seattle-based PlayFab provides backend services for connected games on mobile devices and PCs. It provides things game developers need to run their games -- like player data storage, player relationship management, tournaments, in-game commerce, and leaderboards. IBM will take that data, crunch it, and come up with insights that help developers run their games better. It's a new way for IBM to participate in what market researcher Newzoo says is a $91 billion market.

Amazon's voice assistant Alexa has become a hugely popular and growing business. In fact, David Limp, an Amazon senior vice president who oversees Alexa and all of its Amazon devices, says that Alexa is rapidly adding "skills," with more than 1,000 people working on it. On Tuesday, at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference, Limp spoke to Fortune's Adam Lashinsky about the inspiration for Alexa (hint: Think Star Trek) and the origin of the name to where the business is heading. Here is the lightly-edited transcript. Dave Limp: The device business is less about building hardware for customers and more about building services behind that hardware. So the original vision of Kindle was to deliver any book ever written in less than 60 seconds, and that was all about creating a cloud-based service that had a great catalogue of books, great selection, and great prices. And as we've rolled out devices since then, everything from Fire TV to, as you mentioned, Echo and Alexa and everything in between, it's about creating that backend service that constantly improves and adds value for customers, and isn't just a gadget but instead a full end to end service that can benefit what customers want.

Is there a next phase for cloud computing? During the past few years, cloud computing has become a mainstream element of modern software solutions just as common as websites or databases. The cloud computing market is a race vastly dominated by four companies: Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM with a few other platforms with traction in specific regional markets such as AliCloud in China. In such a consolidated market, it's hard to imagine a technology being disruptive enough to alter the existing dynamics. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the type of technology with the potential to not only improve the existing cloud platform incumbents but also power a new generation of cloud computing technologies.

Is there a next phase for cloud computing? During the past few years, cloud computing has become a mainstream element of modern software solutions just as common as websites or databases. The cloud computing market is a race vastly dominated by four companies: Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM with a few other platforms with traction in specific regional markets such as AliCloud in China. In such a consolidated market, it's hard to imagine a technology being disruptive enough to alter the existing dynamics. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the type of technology with the potential to not only improve the existing cloud platform incumbents but also power a new generation of cloud computing technologies. The thesis of a new generation of cloud computing platforms might seem ludicrous at first but it also presents a very intriguing argument.