I enjoy being able to switch gears between all the different areas of my API research. It helps me find the interesting areas of overlap and potentially synchronicity in how APIs are being put to work. After thinking about the API abstraction layer present in Meya's bot platform, I was reading about Clearbit's iPaaS integration layer with Zapier. Zaps are just like the components employed by Meya, and Clearbit walks us through delivering intended workflows with the valuable APIs they provide, executed Zapier's iPaaS service.
Whether its skills for voice, intents for bots, or triggers for iPaaS, an API is delivering the data, content, or algorithmic response required for these interactions. I've been pushing for API providers to be iPaaS ready, working with providers like Zapier for some time. I predict you'll hear find me showcasing examples of API providers sharing their voice and bot integration solutions, just like with Clearbit has with their iPaaS solutions, in the future.
I would say that even before API providers think about the Internet of Things, they should be thinking more deeply about iPaaS, voice, and bots. Not that all these areas will be relevant, or valuable to your API operations, but they should be considered. If you have the resources, they might provide you with some interesting ways to make your API more accessible to non-developers--as Clearbit opens their blog post opening.
When it comes to skills, intents, and iPaaS workflows, I am thinking we are going to have to be more willing to share our definitions (broken record), like we see Meya doing with their Bot Flow Markup Language (BFML) in YAML. I will have to do some more digging to see how Amazon is working to make Alexa Skills more shareable and reusable, as well as take another look edition of the Zapier API to understand what is possible--I took a look at it back in the spring, but will need a refresher.
While the world of voice and bots API integration seems to be moving pretty fast, I predict it will play out much like the iPaaS world has, and take years to evolve, and stabilize. I'm still skeptical about the actual adoption of voice and bots, and it all living up to the hype, but when it comes to iPaaS I'm super hopeful about the benefits to actual humans--maybe if we consider all of these channels together, we can leverage them all equally as common tools in our API integration toolbox.
