I wanted to keep this blog post as simple as possible so even beginner Python devs could get through it in one short sitting. However, it's definitely possible to integrate the command processing piece with backend APIs. I'd first try using the TextBlob library before an external service though: https://textblob.readthedocs.io/en/dev/

My colleague Rob also wrote a post that uses TextBlog with a similar bot-type application over SMS: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2014/06/using-natural-language-p...