covering South by Southwest 2017, brought to you by Intel.

Now, here's John Furrier.

>> Hey, welcome everyone back for day two

of live coverage of South by Southwest.

This is the cube, our flagship program from Silicon Angle.

We go out to the events and extract the (mumbles).

We're at the Intel AI Lounge, people are rolling in,

it's an amazing vibe here, South by Southwest.

The themes are AI, virtual reality,

augmented reality, technology.

They got great booths here, free beers, free drinks,

and of course great sessions and great conversations

here with the Cube.

My first guest of the day here is Ben Parr,

a friend of the Cube.

He's been an entrepreneur, he's been a social media maven,

he's been a journalist, all around great guy.

Ben, thanks for joining us today.

>> Thank you for having me again.

>> So you're a veteran with South by Southwest,

you know the social scene, you've seen the evolution

from Web 2.0 all the way to today, had Scobel on yesterday,

Brian Fanzo, really the vibe is all about

that next level, of social to connecting

and you got a startup you're working on

that you founded, co-founded called AI?

>> Ben: Octane AI.

>> Octane AI, that's in the heart

of this new social fabric that's developing.

Where AI is starting to do stuff, keep learning,

analytics but, ultimately, it's just a connection.

Talk about your company.

What is Octane AI?

Tell us a little bit about the company.

>> So Octane AI is a platform that lets you

build an audience on Facebook Messenger

and then through a bot.

And so, what we do is allow you

to create a presence on Messenger because

if I told you there was a social app

that had a billion users every month,

bigger than Snapchat plus Twitter plus Instagram combined

you'd want to figure out a strategy

for how to engage with those people right?

And that social app is Facebook Messenger.

And yet no one ever thinks,

oh could I build an audience on a messaging app?

Could I build an audience on Messenger

or WeChat or any of the others.

But you can through a bot.

And you can not just build an audience but you can

create really engaging content through conversation.

So what we've done is, we've made it really easy

to make a bot on messenger but more importantly,

a real reason for people to, actually,

come to your bot and engage with it

and make it really easy to create content for it.

In the same way you create content for a blog

or create content for YouTube Channel.

Maroon 5, Aerosmith, KISS, Lindsay Lohan,

30 seconds to MARS, Jason Derulo

and a whole bunch more use us to build an audience

and engage their fans on Messenger.

>> So let me get your thoughts on a couple

of trends around this.

Cause this is really kind of, to me,

a key part that chat bots illustrate

the big trends that are going on.

Chat bots were the hype.

People were talking about, oh chat bots.

It's a good mental model for people to see AI

but it also has been, kind of, I won't say

a pest, if you will, for users.

It's been like a notification.

A notification of the economy we're living in.

Now you're taking it to the next level.

This is what we're seeing.

The deep learnings and the analytics

around turning notifications which can

be noisy after a while, into real content and connections.

>> Into something useful, absolutely.

Like look, the last year of bots.

The Facebook platform is not even a year old.

We've been in that fart apps stage of bots.

Remember the first year of mobile apps?

You had the fart app and that made

$50,000 a day and that was annoying as hell.

We're at that stage now, the experimentation stage.

And we've seen different companies

going in different, really cool directions.

Our direction is, how do you create compelling content

so you're not spamming people but you have content

that you can share, not just in your bot

but as a link on your social media

to your followers, to your fans, on Twitter,

everywhere else and have a scalable conversation

about whatever you want.

Maroon 5 has conversations with their audience

about their upcoming tours or they even

released an exclusive preview

of their new song, Cold, through our bots.

You could do almost anything with our bots

or with any bot.

We're just learning right now, as an industry,

what are the best practices.

>> So where do bots go for the next level?

Because you and I have known each other

for almost over 10 years,

we've seen the whole movement

and now we're living in a fake news era.

But social media is evolving where content now

is super important that glues

people together, communities together.

In a way, you're taking AI or bots, if you will.

Which is a first, I mean, .5 version of

where AI is going.

Where content, now, is being blended into notifications.

How important is content in community?

>> Content in community are essential to any product.

And I feel like when you hear the word bot,

you don't think community and that you could

build a community with it because it's a bot,

it's supposed to be automated.

But you, actually, can if you do it in the right way

and it can be a very, very powerful experience.

We're building features that allow

you to build more community in your bot

and have people who are talking with your bot

communicate with each other.

There's a lot of that.

What I feel like is, we're at the zero point one

or zero point two of the long scale of AI.

What we need to do right now is showcase

all the use cases that really work for AI,

bots, machine learning.

Over time, we will be adding

more other great technologies

from Intel and others that will make

all these technologies and everything we do better,

more social and most of all, more personalized.

I think that's one of the big benefits of AI.

>> Do you see bot technology or what bots

can turn into being embedded into things

like autonomous vehicles, AR, is there

a stack developing, if you will, around bots?

What you're talking about is a progression of bots.

What's your vision on where this goes down the road?

>> I see a bunch of companies, now, building

the technological stack for AI.

I see a bunch of companies building

the consumer interface, bots is one

of those consumer interfaces.

Not just chat bots but voice bots.

And then I see another layer that's more enterprise

that's helping make more efficient things

like recruiting or all sorts of automation or driving.

That are being built as well.

But you need each of those stacks

to work really well to make this all work.

>> So are there bots here at South by Southwest?

Is there a bot explosion, is there bots

that tell you where the best parties are?

What's the scene here at Southby?

Where are the bots and if there were bots,

what would they be doing to help people

figure out what to do?

>> The Southby bot is, actually, not a bad bot.

They launched their bot just before South by Southwest.

It has a good party recommendations and things.

But it the standard bot.

I feel like what we're seeing is the best use,

there's a lot of good bot people.

What I'm seeing right now is that people

are still flushing out the best use cases for their bots.

There's no bot yet that can predict

all the parties you want to go to.

We got to have our expectations set.

That will happen but we're still

a few years away from really deep AI bots.

But there are clearly ones where you can

communicate faster with your friends.

There's clearly ones that help you

connect with your favorite artist.

There's clearly ones that help you

build an audience and communicate at scale.

And I feel like the next step is the usefulness.

>> Talk about the user interface.

Robert Scobel and I were talking yesterday,

we have some guests coming on today

that had user experience background.

With AI, with virtual reality, with bots,

with deep learning, all this collective intelligence

going on, what's your vision of the user interface

as it changes, as people's expectations?

What are some of those things that you

might see developing pretty quickly

as deep learning, analytics, more data stats come online?

What is the user interface?

Cause bots will intersect with that

as an assistant or a value add for the user.

What's your vision on?

>> I'll tell you what I see in the near term

and then I'll tell you a really crazy idea

of how I see the long term.

In the near term, I think what you're going to see

is bots have become more predictive.

That, based on your conversations, are more personalized

and maybe not a necessarily need

as much input from you to be really intelligent.

And so voice, text, standard interfaces that we're used to.

I think the bigger, longer run is neurological.

Is the ability to interface without having to speak.

Is AI as a companion to help us

in everything we do.

I feel like, in 30 years, we won't even,

it's, kind of like, do your remember

the world when it had no internet?

It's hard, it feels so much different.

There will be a point in about 20 years

we will not understand what the world was before AI.

Before AI assistance where assisting us

mentally, automatically and through every interface.

And so good AI's, in the long run,

don't just run on one bot or one thing,

they follow you wherever you go.

Right now it might be on your phone.

When you get home, it may be on your home,

it may be in your car but it should be

the same sets of AI's that you use daily.

>> Doctor Nevine Rou, yesterday,

called the AI the bulldozer for data.

What bulldozers where in the real world,

AI's going to do that for data.

Cause you want to service more data

and make things more usable for users.

>> Yes, the data really helps AI

become more personalized and that's a really

big benefit to the user to every individual.

The more personalized the experience,

the less you have to do.

>> Alright, so what's the most amazing thing

you've seen so far this year at Southby?

What's going on out there that's pretty amazing?

That's popping out of the wood work?

In terms of either trend, content,

product, demos, what are some of

the cool things you're seeing.