the future of entertainment, sit down theaters or stand up action? plus, hearing voices. how computers are learning to understand what we say no matter how we say it. our reporters rich jaraslowski and mare abel lopez, this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone, i'm scott mcgrew. there is a debate in the entertainment world over the future of story telling, particularly in movies. is the future of movies the same as its past, putting images on the screen for people to watch passively or is it more

interactive using virtual reality to bring the viewer in on the action? this is a new technology called spaces, a spinoff of movie maker dream works in which audience members use vr gear to take part in a short action sequence in the world of terminators. there is a youtube video of the experience. i guarantee you while you're in it it's very entertaining. is that rad is founder and ceo of spaces. i presume he holds the high score, he is one of the world's leadingers perts in virtual reality. so this thing is in the malls and i want to compare it to laser tag and i can't tell if that's going to make you angry or not because it's so much more, but to somebody who has never seen it it's sort of laser tag. >> yeah, i mean, it's -- you

describe it one way, but everyone else describes it all kinds of different ways, it's part laser tag, i will give that to you, it's part theme park, it's part movie, part game all mashed up together in its own kind of new thing. the best way i like to say is you can go to the movies and you can watch a movie, in our experiences you step into the movie and you become the star. >> and to those who have not done it and i did it, i phenomenal because it's more than just the headset, you've got -- you've got, you know, sensors all over your body and when you look at your own hand, it's a robot hand, you know, or whatever theme you happen to be doing. which makes it so much more convincing than just simply a heads headset. >> it's a premium experience where you have full total body immersion, so we track your hands, feet, body and you're able to walk freely throughout the physical space which is blended in this digital world. go with a few friends.

so if we are all in it together and we've got to go do this it would be so fun, we can see each other and reach out and give each other high-fives and interact with each other as well as the world. >> when i did this with one of your competitors one of the things i was struck by was just how heavy the equipment was. when do we get to do this in a way that is -- allows you to move more freely and to be more natural in your participation? >> that's a great question. we've been at this for at least six years, three years at dream works and three years at spaces. every six months or year the hardware that we use gets smaller or better, better quality, higher resolution, lighter in some ways or just more powerful. so there's this evolution of the hardware where we continue to upgrade our experiences with the latest technology. so i think in the next few years things are going just to all in one head sets without needing to wear backpacks and that is going

to unlock an entirely new category of experiences. >> shiraz, let me ask you about passive experience, entertainment has been a fairly passive experience maybe with the exception of concerts and the like. how big do you think this can be? is this something that's fundamentally going to change how people engage with content or is it still going to be a niche opportunity for the coming years? >> i think like any new technology it starts off niche and then it expands, just like the internet, just like mobile computing. this is perceptual computing. this is one of many form factors is we're bringing it into an entertainment form factor. if you imagine the future of a theme park, right now today theme parks are mechanical, they're really fun, cool to go to, but they're not necsarily interactive, they are not digital and i think that's what this is going to unlock. >> you gauged the analogy i think a better analogy would be 3-d printing, it's something that we as reporters are guilty of saying everybody is going to have a 3-d printer in the house

and it's going to be amazing and then it wasn't. i think vr has been to some degree the same way. just around the corner it's gen to be phenomenal but then it never quite is. but then people experience what cnge their minds a bit, may although it would not be an in home experience for quite some time. >> there are different experiences, what we're building is something you can't do at home. i like to think back to our years at dream works animation where our old bosses would always say build the best experience and then you can build a business around that. so our aim is to deliver at least for location-based attractions and experiences the best most immersive thing that you can do so that people get excited about what we're -- the product, versus just the technology. >> is the location-based approach, though, ultimately going to be doomed by technology? i mean, we've already seen, you know, home entertainment supplant a lot of the experience

of going to the movies -- >> or the home video arcade or the video arcade replacement. >> how quickly is that g to happen and is that sort of a long-term threat or will there always be a market for people who want to go someplace to experience something? >> yeah, i mean, i think there is a natural tendency for humans to want to leave their home, not necessarily everyone, and i think it's important that we all get out into the communities and do stuff together. so when we think about what we're building it's an activity that a group of people can do together and that's kind of our focus. it's not necessarily building vr or this technology or that, it's let's create an experience that requires us to go out and have fun together. i think there's always going to be a place for that and more importantly it's just an expansion of the entertainment offerings out there. the home experiences are going to get amazing that you can do at t continue to get hr that y experience.

what we have planned like for the next year andhe year aftero which leads me to the next question, which is video games and this is sort of a video game tend to lepd themselves to conflict and physicality, guns -- and i have no objection to guns in video games don't get me wrong, i play video games all the time, but it's just a natural, well, we're going to shoot something. it would be nice to create a situation in which it's to stereotype an 8-year-old girl's birthday party'tnvolve killer robots, but the technology and the physicality may make that difficult. can you imagine a vr situation that's more about ponies? >> well, about whales and penguins. in fact w an experience with national geographic -- >> i just set you up and i didn't even know it, didn't i? i did not mean to feed you a straight line, but go ahead. >> we actually created a theater show format, a virtual theater

show format where a real life national geographic explorer are stand on stage and take the audience on an expedition to antarctica or wherever it may be. we did one this other weekend where a local from the bay area, a researcher and world expert with manta raies took an audience into the pacific ocean. >> let me ask a slightly different question. do you see this integrating with other big trends that are happening now such as esports? for example, is there an opportunity to take somebody playing vr into your venue and then have that interface with the esports community? >> yeah, you know, that's a great, great question because we do see different types of location-based experiences emerging. so in the experience that you experienced, you playing together with people, that's oop testify, butre still a scoring element in what we have so people try to compete for the

high score within that. afterwards you get a video, you get to take ithome. people like to watch people doing vr, but more importantly like to see them competing or working together and i think that -- that's a natural extension to why are poiyour po you're going to see that for sure. >> i'm running up against a commercial break, but what is the thing in there that makes you go that's so cool, i can't believe we pulled that off? >> just seeing people come out, it's really exciting to hear people say i just didn't know that was possible. i didn't know that existed. that was amazing, exhilarating m out with t and friends or coworkers and they did something, this crazy adventure, and they have this shared experience. it's just neat to see that. we had worked on this for years in a warehouse in burbank and weren't sure how people were going to react. it's just really exciting to see that we're actually, you know,

bringing people together in a fun way using technology in a way that they will never forget. >> shiraz is the ceo of spaces. thanks for being with us this morning. up next, i tell a really bad joke and we try to understand why computers don't understand us. when "press: here" continues.

♪ welcome back to "press: here." there is a very old joke about the way programmers think, it goes like this, the wife tells her engineer husband please go to eggs, get store had eggs. now, we can modernize that and say the husband told the engineer wife or maybe they are both wives or husbands, who cares. the humor behind the joke if you

can call it that, it's hard for computers to understand what it is we mean. that is the challenge for artificial intelligence programmers all over silicon valley. this is video of otter.ai where they're teaching computers to transcribe the english language, you say it in a meeting or at a ted talk or on a phone call and otter's computers can give you a written record. sam land is the ceo of otter.ai, someone told me he is the guy behind the blue dot on google computers have to figure out when hearing people talk? >> it's very difficult because there is a huge variation when people speak words. you know, the pronunciation is differaccent, different level of noise in the background, people have different pace.

and also the language itself, it's very ambiguous. a lot of words have similar pronunciation, you know -- >> like threw the ball through the window, there's going to be some context there. >> the context is another level of difficulty, right? when you talk to doctors, they talk medical terms. there are different jargons, if you go to a technology company there are a lot of acronyms which they understand but you don't necessarily understand. and new words are being invented every day in silicon valley and in the world. there are a lot of of so all of this makes it really immigrants here, right? difficult to understand the speaking language. >> yet this has been kind of the -- for 20 years or 25 years h.thehing that i've always wondered about is, i mean, technology moore's law, the

power behind computing has advanced so much, why is it that it seemss ut of reach to have really good natural language processing and understanding? >> there are two major reasons, one is that, again, it's intrinsically complicated. >> a lot of things are complicated. technology has solved a lot of complicated things. >> yes, but this one has humans involved. >> true. >> think about it, when people talk about speech recognition the first thing people thought about these days are alexa, siri or google home, you sa sounds l solved the problem, but the difference this, when you talk to alexa you're talking to a robot, so it's basically a check bot thatis your short question and answers the question, but when tk to another person or talk to ten other people in a meeting, it's ten times orknow, 2

times more complicated because you are talking to multiple people with different -- with different accents, different pace, different distance between the speakers and the microphone. people interrupt each other, people talk much faster. they don't necessarily speak in grammatically-correct ways and they talk about things that they discussed last week. so they have a lot of -- the context evolved. if you don't have the context you don't know what they are talking about. >> is there a particular accent that is tougher than others? i know there are youtube videos in which scottish people try to talk to siri so i'm guessing scottish is going to be one of them, where you say, boy, we just need a teaju even in the u.s., people in texas, boston or california, they talk differently. between the u.s. and the uk, it's different accent, you know,

this guy george bernard shaw said the united states and great britain are two countries separated by a common language. >> right. >> the pronunciations are different, the meanings are different, soccer versus football, what are you talking about? the spelling is different between u.s. and uk. and now in the u.s. and especially in silicon valley, you know, we have a lot of engineers from india, from china, from other countries, right, south africa, australia. they all talk in different accent s you know, actually havs of hours of audio data to train the deep learning model to learn all kinds of different accents. >> so let me pick upnne learnin data along with yourpe bounded. if we are going to move beyond, say, the asking one question, what do you see is where this technology could go? let's just assume that we use machine learning, big data, we

have better and more data, we get there. what kind of things are going to happen? what kind of business models are going to emerge? what kind of applications are we going to see happening? >> we see this as really going to be pervasive. you're not -- think about alexa, how many times do you talk to alexa? maybe three times, maybe five times, probably no more than ten times, but think about how much you talk to other people, you know, we are talking right now with four people, when you go home you talk to your to your c have, you know, five or ten meetings every week with your colleagues. so people spend most of their time talking to other human beings rather than talking to a robot. so the business model or use cases are infinite. we see because, you know, if you think about it how many words do you speak in your entire life? there are studies to show that a person may speak 800 million

words in their lifetime. >> i want to fit in oquestion a case for otter.ai and i've used it and it's amazing, i can upload an audio file and that's exactly what these people said with little -- with little distraction -- or error, rather. what is the legality of recording somebody to text? is it any different than the legality of recording somebody's audio? in other words, i can't record you on a telephone without letting you know i'm recording you on a telephone, but i'm not recording you, i'm transcribing you. is there any legality change there? >> that's a good question. i guess there is so the gray area there. recording the voice, there is a federal law that says it has to be -- you have to be part of the conversation to record. >> right. >> but california has two-party consent to record, but to take

notes, i don't think there is explicit law -- >> and i'm not taking the notes, the computer s but then again somebody is taking notes. >> my personal view is this, if you're just taking notes there should be no limitation because if you can type really fast -- >> or have a computer do it for you. >> if you go to your doctor actually there is an assistant e the law -- i don't think it's a >> right. static when new technologies are >> right. in >> that is the -- technology that the law never quite catches up to what technology is doing. >> we need to reconsider some laws. >> sam land is with otter.aii i appreciate you being with us this morning. >> thank you very much. what if you took all that machine learning we were talking about and applied it to the news, when "press: here" continues.

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welcome back to "press: here." our contributor rich jaroslovsky has been at the forefront of digital news for quiome practi online newspapers, he created the "wall street journal" online, back when putting a newspaper on theall but unheard. his latest effort is something called smart news, the news delivered by app has 15 million readers and says it provides news from all points of view, expanding your news bubble.tv as that point. >> smart news. >> let'smerie great again. >> yes, we can. together. download smart news, get news from all sides. >> see, i was right. >> first time for everything. >> rich is chief journalist there where he works with engineers to tweak the algorithm to that makes rich's boss the editor in chief a computer, if i'm not mace taken. more or less. >> do you know why those two people were happy to talk to each other?

>> why is that? >> they were actors. all right. so bubble, we use that word. define to me the bubble that you are trying to expand. what is the bubble? >> well, technology has made it possible to deliver scientifically proven content to you that is of incredible interest to you and only to you and that's a bad thing. that's kind of like serving you up crack, you just want -- you keep consuming more and more of it and yet your life actually deteriorates. >> if you get angry enough at somebody on a twitter feed you just stop following them and you reinforce your own set of beliefs. >> exactly. so what we're trying to do with smart news is to use the technology that exists to expand the perspectives and to almost compel you to get different points of view, even points of view that you occasionally may not agree with, but at least you can hear what t -- what other folks are saying. >> so let me ask you a question

on that because to date how this has been done, i've clicked on something, i've read something, you know that, t not -- if you are not taking into account my feedback? is it a global universe of feedback? is somebody trying to figure out, hey, her that? like how does tnto account your feedback because we want to know as much about your interests so we can find things that you didn't know you would -- would appeal to you. it isn't really just about politics, but it's about sort of what your level of interest is in things that you haven't necessarily tapped into. >> this is why i like traditional media, things on npr where i wouldn't ever want to listen to a reporter about bluegrass music and all of a sudden i'm like that's interesting. because i haven't chosen the story myself i'm forced to listen to it and i'm like that's more interesting than i was expecting. >> one of the stories that i came across that i just loved

was an australian story about efforts to preserve tasmanian devils. now, i'm a child of the '60s and '# 0s, the only tasmanian devil i know is cartoon character. there is not a personalization algorithm and nothing i ever tapped on directly said rich would read this story. >> no. >> and yet i think because of what i've tapped on and the sort of breadth of my interests, the algorithm made an educated guess that maybe i would be interested in this and i can tell you i read every comma of that story. it was delightful. >> how are you making money off me? the app is free, the content is free. >> that was my question, too. >> where do you have the skin in the game on this? >> the other piece of what we do is we want to be good partners with publishers and content providers. we have ads that we sell within smart news, but we also have ads and ways to drive revenue to our publisher partners. so we're trying very much to sort of nurture the ecosystem

because if the news succeed we succeed. >> rich jaroslovsky has 15 million readers on smart news, a free app, y it

i don't see the commercial breaks from here in the studio, but i'm going to presume we showed you an ad for our new podcast at least one time. now, not to belabor the point, but we got a new podcast and i want you to subscribe to it. you can download it on every device you have, including the old iphones you have in your junk drawer. charge them up and on every single one of them download sand hill road from itunes, google play or wherever you get your podcasts. that's our show for this week, my thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

♪ ♪ to "comunidad del valle," i'm damian trujillo. and today, "los idolos del pueblo," los tigres del norte, right here in our studio, exclusive, on your "comunidad del valle." male announcer: nbc bay area presents "comunidad del valle" with damian trujillo. ♪ [singing in foreign language] [singing in foreign language] damian: yeah, this is another legendary band. this is banda recodo de don cruz lizarraga. they're here in our studio to enlighten us, because they're gonna be sharing a stage with los tigres del norte

and paquita la del barrio. welcome to the show, gentl.nd, . it's ourre y to stay with you here. damian: thank you.