REST2Bot: Bridging the Gap between Bot Platforms and REST APIs

With the development of REST (REpresentational State Transfer) APIs, many applications have been designed to harness their potential. As such, bots emerged recently as natural interfaces to facilitate conversations between humans and API-accessible services. Existing bot development platforms (e.g., Dialogflow, Wit.ai) facilitate building bots, but bot developers are still required to provide training data by defining corresponding intents (user’s intention such as booking a hotel) and entities (e.g., hotel location) for each API. Moreover, bot developers are required to build and deploy webhook functions to invoke APIs on intents detection. In this paper, we introduce REST2Bot, a tool that addresses these shortcomings (e.g., translating APIs to Intents, and invoking APIs based on detected Intents) in bot development frameworks to automate several tasks in the life cycle of the bot development process. REST2Bot relies on automated approaches for parsing OpenAPI specifications, generating training data, building bots on desired bot development frameworks, and generating deployable webhook functions to map intents and entities to APIs.