Applying Chatbots to the Internet of Things: Opportunities and Architectural Elements

📝 Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as a significant technology in shaping the future by connecting physical devices or things with internet. It also presents various opportunities for intersection of other technological trends which can allow it to become even more intelligent and efficient. In this paper we focus our attention on the integration of Intelligent Conversational Software Agents or Chatbots with IoT. Literature surveys have looked into various applications, features, underlying technologies and known challenges of IoT. On the other hand, Chatbots are being adopted in greater numbers due to major strides in development of platforms and frameworks. The novelty of this paper lies in the specific integration of Chatbots in the IoT scenario. We analyzed the shortcomings of existing IoT systems and put forward ways to tackle them by incorporating chatbots. A general architecture is proposed for implementing such a system, as well as platforms and frameworks, both commercial and open source, which allow for implementation of such systems. Identification of the newer challenges and possible future directions with this new integration, have also been addressed.

💡 Analysis

Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as a significant technology in shaping the future by connecting physical devices or things with internet. It also presents various opportunities for intersection of other technological trends which can allow it to become even more intelligent and efficient. In this paper we focus our attention on the integration of Intelligent Conversational Software Agents or Chatbots with IoT. Literature surveys have looked into various applications, features, underlying technologies and known challenges of IoT. On the other hand, Chatbots are being adopted in greater numbers due to major strides in development of platforms and frameworks. The novelty of this paper lies in the specific integration of Chatbots in the IoT scenario. We analyzed the shortcomings of existing IoT systems and put forward ways to tackle them by incorporating chatbots. A general architecture is proposed for implementing such a system, as well as platforms and frameworks, both commercial and open source, which allow for implementation of such systems. Identification of the newer challenges and possible future directions with this new integration, have also been addressed.

📄 Content

Applying Chatbots to the Internet of Things: Opportunities and Architectural Elements Rohan Kar1 Hyderabad, India rohankar99@gmail.com

Rishin Haldar2 School of Computing Sciences and Engineering, VIT University,
Vellore, India rishinhaldar@vit.ac.in

Abstract—Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as a significant technology in shaping the future by connecting physical devices or things with internet. It also presents various opportunities for intersection of other technological trends which can allow it to become even more intelligent and efficient. In this paper we focus our attention on the integration of Intelligent Conversational Software Agents or Chatbots with IoT. Literature surveys have looked into various applications, features, underlying technologies and known challenges of IoT. On the other hand, Chatbots are being adopted in greater numbers due to major strides in development of platforms and frameworks. The novelty of this paper lies in the specific integration of Chatbots in the IoT scenario. We analyzed the shortcomings of existing IoT systems and put forward ways to tackle them by incorporating chatbots. A general architecture is proposed for implementing such a system, as well as platforms and frameworks – both commercial and open source – which allow for implementation of such systems. Identification of the newer challenges and possible future directions with this new integration, have also been addressed. Keywords—Internet of Things, Chatbots, Human- Computer Interaction, Conversational User Interfaces, Software Agents I. INTRODUCTION The Internet of Things (IoT) is not just a well-recognized phenomenon but one that is shaping the digital age. It introduces an era of interconnected smart objects or ‘things’ developed upon existing internet architectures. By using unique addressing schemes and standard communication protocols, IoT interconnects these things or objects thereby creating a varied range of technologies are able to interact with each other and reach common goals [1].

An essential goal of connecting various sensors, actuators and services and collecting/processing data from them is to generate situational awareness and enable machines and human users to make sense of themselves and their surrounding environments.
The proliferation of IoT can be seen through adoption of these “smart devices” in our daily life which include applications in Manufacturing, Agriculture, Medical and Healthcare, Transportation, Building and Home Automation and Energy Management among others. A report by Gartner estimates that there will be over 20 Billion connected things in activity by 2020 with Cisco estimating the number to be over 50 Billion [2, 3]. Among them more than half of all IoT endpoints in the consumer space alone. Hence IoT is a phenomenon which is certain to play a major role in our daily interaction with the digitally connected world.

A. Scope of Internet of Things The literature presents various ways to define the Internet of Things. The RFID group defines Internet of Things as “world- wide network of interconnected objects uniquely addressable, based on standard communication protocols”. ITU [4] defines it as “a global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies”.
While considering the broad vision of IoT, this paper focuses on the perspective of connected things and applications for those things. To do this we simply create a separation of concern between the fragmented lower Open System Interconnection (OSI) layers of IoT and the unifying adopted upper layers of IoT communication which uses the World Wide Web and its standard network protocols.
The entire IoT system consists of Sensors (temperature, light, motion, etc.), Actuators (displays, sound, motors, etc.), Computation (programs and logic), and Communication interfaces (wired or wireless). However, based on established advantages presented in the literature [5, 6, 7, 8], our scope will be limited to interaction with IoT through Web Application Programming Interfaces (API) and in particular Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) based Representational State Transfer (REST) Architectures. A popular approach of Web of Things has been illustrated in Fig 1 based on [6].

The Evans Data Corporation (EDC) Report: Internet of Things - Vertical Research Service study [9] reveals that more than half of IoT developers connect to devices primarily through the cloud. The massive growth and acceptance of these cloud based platforms such as IBM IoT Platform, AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure IoT and Cisco IoT show that the new generation of IoT applications concentrate on cloud based platforms with the lower layers (Transfer, Transport and Network). Hence, this paper also pro

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