‘The Next Era of Software Development’: A Recap of Bubble’s AI Event

On Tuesday, March 28, Unlocking the Power of AI on Bubble brought the community together to discuss the rapid evolution of generative AI, and how AI and no-code are shaping the future of software.

If you couldn’t make it, you can watch a replay of the whole event below. Or, if you’re short on time, keep scrolling — we’ve got you covered with a recap of the jam-packed hour of conversation and demos, including:

• An inspiring introduction from Bubble founder and Co-CEO Josh Haas
• A live look at some Bubble apps using AI today, and tips and advice from their founders
• A preview of some of the most exciting Bubble-AI integrations being built right now
• A conversation with Josh about the future of Bubble and AI

Bubble and AI: A Symbiotic Relationship

The event was bookended by Josh Haas, Bubble founder and Co-CEO. In his opening, Josh posed the question of how no-code and AI fit together, saying that he sees the pair working together in two dimensions:

“Both AI and no-code are very empowering technologies, and they’re extremely symbiotic,” Josh said. As he wrote recently in his think piece on AI and no-code, Bubble offers “a super-powerful front end for AI” that makes it easier and faster for more people to create AI-based applications. On the flip side, AI is an empowering mechanism for more people to produce no-code applications more quickly. This idea of a virtuous cycle of better apps built faster — and by more people — set the tone for the rest of the day’s conversations.

Building Byword, the AI-powered SEO Content Platform

Théo Goldberg, Bubble Senior Ecosystem Associate and emcee for the event, then introduced Allen Yang, Bubble VP of Product, and Mack Grenfell, founder of Byword.ai. A veteran Bubble user based in London, Mack detailed how he turned his consulting practice into a longform SEO content platform that uses AI to let customers generate full articles based on titles or keywords.

“You put your settings in — what article length you want, what kind of writing style — and once you click generate, you can sync it with your website or CMS,” Mack explained. “Byword handles everything from there. It writes the articles, the HTML, the metatag structure: all of it.”

Mack detailed his journey from “aha!” moment to minimum viable product in roughly four weeks — check it out in Byword’s showcase story. Then he and Allen delved into the power of building AI apps on Bubble using a “hybrid” approach. Mack combines a Bubble front-end with custom Python scripts in the back, which lets him focus on tuning his scripts and API calls to get more out of rapidly evolving generative AI models like the newly released GPT-4. It’s an approach Allen said he’s seeing more and more Bubblers take.

Demos and Inspiration from a Panel of Power Users

Next up was a panel discussion featuring three Bubble power users talking about — and demonstrating — the cutting-edge work they’re doing with Bubble and AI:

• Marina Trajkovska, Co-Founder and CTO of VoicePen, showed a short demo of her app, which converts audio to written blog posts. She demonstrated using a YouTube video as her audio source, though VoicePen supports multiple file formats for input.
• Albert Astabatsyan, Co-Founder at Stack3, a decentralized agency building Bubble apps for clients, showed a demo of workifAI, a recently launched app that leverages AI to generate project scopes and proposals for client work.
• Josh Munsch then gave a demo of Vocion, a voice-to-Notion transcription app he built to support his daily work leading design at Gantry, a startup that helps product companies optimize their own machine learning models.

Then the panel delved into tips, tricks, and techniques for building AI apps with Bubble. They highlighted the speed, ease, and flexibility of developing with no-code. They also spoke to the power of Bubble for would-be entrepreneurs with no prior development experience.

“I have a totally non-technical background. I used to work in finance, and at some point, I just decided to do my own startup because I was super interested in tech,” Albert explained. “People were talking about Bubble, so I tried it out and got addicted. It’s something that empowers people like me, Marina, and Josh [Munsch], who have no technical background, just to pick it up and do it by themselves.”

Though Josh Munsch summed it up nicely — “The biggest thing is: tinker endlessly” — the full conversation (21:19–42:35) is packed with inspirational stories, and practical advice for getting started with no-code, and building a deeper understanding of how everything from design and databases to API calls works in Bubble.

An OpenAI Plugin is Coming! And More from our Technical Partners

Next, three of Bubble’s technology partners took to the stage to discuss some exciting, under-the-hood advances for the Bubble community to leverage in their own apps.

Pradeep Kumar Muthukamatchi, Principal Technical Architect with Microsoft Azure, gave a highly anticipated look into what Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI means to Bubble users. They’re currently at work on a new Bubble plugin for Azure OpenAI Service. The Azure OpenAI plugin, coming soon, will make it even easier to leverage Azure Cloud models and services, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and DALL-E (for image generation), in your Bubble apps.

Jeremy Lambert, Product Lead at Eden AI, then showed off his company’s API, which offers face detection, image generation, text-to-speech, identity parsing, and more via 14 newly released Bubble plugins. Jeremy explained that Eden is not an AI provider, but rather an API aggregator working to offer end-users the easiest way to leverage the best AI services on the market.

The third and final partner to speak was Vincent Pradeilles, Senior iOS Engineer at PhotoRoom, whose mobile and web app — and APIs — empower commerce photography. Vincent demonstrated their background removal API, which lets sellers remove and replace a product image’s background with a new, AI-generated image customized for any audience or application.

How Bubble is Navigating the Age of AI

The final session of the day brought Josh Haas back to the stage for a conversation about Bubble’s own future in a world powered by generative AI. Anita Kirkovska, AI expert and Co-founder and CEO of VoicePen, joined him.

Anita and Josh’s conversation (56:45–1:10:49) focused on AI’s potential to make Bubble easier — and more powerful — for both power users and the non-technical alike. Topics ranged from plans for new documentation and learning materials on building with AI on Bubble, to ideas for integrating an AI-powered assistant into the Bubble editor. They also touched upon recent challenges with GPT-4’s API calls (Bubble is already testing a fix in-house) and the possibility of a Bubble AI hackathon in the near future (no concrete plans quite yet, but … hello, fun!).

Josh closed out the day with a few words of wisdom on the current state of the tech world:

“Things are moving super fast in the AI space. This is definitely early days, right? Everyone who is building stuff with AI and thinking about how to integrate AI needs to come in with a very flexible mindset and sort of a mindset that the technological landscape is going to keep on changing and keep on evolving. And what’s possible today might look very different from what’s possible tomorrow.”

It’s always been true — particularly within the tech space — that tomorrow will probably look very different than today. But the rapid evolution of AI, and Generative AI in particular, is transforming software in big ways right now. It’s an exciting time to be a software developer, and an even more exciting time to be a no-coder building on Bubble.

Keep Talking — and Tinker Endlessly!

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Scroll through and bookmark bubble.io/ai — there’s (always) more to come.