If you think robots are a thing of the future or even the recent past – you might be surprised. Robots have helped humans end wars, diagnose cancers, and now we are working towards digital tools that can even read your mind. Here are our favourite robots from past and present and how we imagine they might work in real estate.
Deep Blue
Breakthrough Achievement
The computer program ‘Deep Blue’ used search and planning to beat world chess champion, Kasparov, in 1997.
How it works?
Search and Planning Ai Techniques: Used to mine vast amounts of data and analysing it to find the next best right thing to do to achieve a goal.
Potential Job in Real Estate
Just like Aire’s Digital Employee platform ‘Rita‘, Deep Blue could use these techniques to deliver daily contact lists to sales agents, to help them connect with the best possible prospects on any given day based on the contact data in the CRM.
Watson
Breakthrough Achievement
IBM’s ‘Watson‘ robot used this technique to beat the world Jeopardy Champion in 2011. In his spare time, Watson now helps oncologists analyse early stage cancer cells for detection and diagnosis; earlier and more accurately than physicians acting alone.
How it works?
Knowledge representation and reasoning techniques: Used to process very large quantities of information, normally from multiple sources, and synthesising it in a way that can be more easily searched than through normal search and manual analysis.
Potential Job in Real Estate
Combining CRM data, and data from the marketplace, Watson could(just like ‘Rita‘ does)make predictions to agents for appraisal leads based on relationship data, social information, listing activity and stock movement, as well as marketplace activity around an owned property.
Siri
Breakthrough Achievement
In 2010, ‘Siri‘ was born in our iPhones. At first, ‘Siri‘ was not all that good at understanding us (particularly those of us who speak ‘Stray-an’ but now she is around 90% accurate. It is because she has ‘learned’ how we use language, including nuance and slang, and she is able to detect what is being asked of her and then respond.
How it works?
Machine learning: Enables machines to use feedback to make improvements to their own systems, automatically.
Potential Job in Real Estate
Ai could enhance the CX for buyers by learning their property requirements. A machine could learn how to ‘match’ properties rather than waiting for buyers to ‘search’; in the same way Amazon suggests books. Realestate.com.au labs are working on this functionality to help buyers find more relevant properties more easily.
Google Duplex
Breakthrough Achievement
In the Google Duplex example, we see the ‘Google Assistant‘ phoning a local hairdressing salon to make a hair appointment with a human receptionist. What if the receptionist was also a robot?
How it works?
Multi-agent systems: The idea that our digital double ‘helper robots’ could communicate with each other and achieve outcomes together, completely independently from the humans they serve.
Potential Job in Real Estate
Personal Ai (like ‘Siri‘ or ‘Google Assistant‘) could connect directly with Agent Ai (like ‘Rita‘) and organise appointments for viewings. Information could be passed in any language, between the two digital agents. It could connect to data in the CRM to enable the agent to provide a hyper-personal and hyper-relevant experience at the open home.
Roomba
Breakthrough Achievement
If you are still vacuuming your house, you need to meet ‘Roomba‘. ‘Roomba‘ is an autonomous little vacuum cleaner that recognises spatial information and can navigate around your house while it does a decent job of cleaning up.
How it works?
Robotics: Intelligent machines that share space with humans in the physical world.
Potential Job in Real Estate
Digital helper robots to clean properties as an ad-on service for tenants and property owners. Imagine a vacate inspection or a pre-settlement inspection where an armada of helper bots have prepared the property in its optimal condition.
Butler 1
Breakthrough Achievement
Butler 1 is a bi-lingual android robot designed by Singhou electronics for Juwai.com. He was created to assist real estate agents at open homes in English speaking countries to communicate with Mandarin speaking buyers.
How it works?
Robotics: Intelligent machines that share space with humans in the physical world plus Natural Language Processing.
Potential Job in Real Estate
Butler1 is already working in real estate but he could also be employed to help agents host open homes over two stories – or to describe features of particular rooms.
Baxter
Breakthrough Achievement
Baxter is a friendly industrial manufacturing bot that can be programmed easily by non-technical operators. He has soft edges and slow movements making him safer than traditional industrial robots.
How it works?
Robotics: Intelligent machines that share space with humans in the physical world plus Natural Language Processing.
Potential Job in Real Estate
With an ageing population and not enough younger people attracted to the caring professions, Baxter could be used to help around the home and reduce the pressure on aged or disability care accommodation.
Relay
Breakthrough Achievement
Relay is a delivery robot used in hotels to deliver food and service to guests on demand.
How it works?
Robotics: Intelligent machines that share space with humans in the physical world plus Search and planning on pre-generated maps so Relay knows where to go, even if wi-fi goes down.
Potential Job in Real Estate
Relay could add premium services to people living in apartments, creating a fully catered lifestyle for people who appreciate (and can afford) a full service mode of living. There is also the potential for ageing or disabled people to live more autonomously supported by robots like relay who could bring food and medication to a bedside as needed.
Banjo
Breakthrough Achievement
‘Banjo‘ provides social media analytics to predict global trends from an aggregated and geo-tagged social media feed; that its creators call the ‘world feed’.
How it works?
Social Networking Analysis: Identifies patterns of behaviour and events among groups and communities to provide early warning of events or potential threats.
Potential Job in Real Estate
This Gods-eye-view of the world could help construct predictive models for financial and property markets, worldwide, as well as on a town by town basis.
AlterEgo
Breakthrough Achievement
By ‘thinking’ words, the device can understand and respond to you ‘internally’. AlterEgo is a wearable, silent speech interface that picks up neurotransmissions between the user’s brain and jaw and responds silently though a conductive vibrational earpiece.
How it works?
Natural language processing and the neural interface that is worn externally on the users jaw and ear.
Potential Job in Real Estate
For those of us who aren’t super human calculators like auctioneers, the device could add up numbers during the auction call and return the current bid total. So it may be over-engineered for that – but, it could allow an agent to ‘think’ queries from data during a conversation with buyers and have the answer returned to them silently all while conversing. You would just have to explain the funny looking headpiece.
Victory
Breakthrough Achievement
Victory was the name of the machine created by Alan Turing during World War II that cracked the German Enigma code. The feature film, The Imitation Game, is based on the life and work of Turing though in the movie, the machine was called ‘Christopher’ as a nod to Turing’s first love who inspired his pursuit of mathematics. It is estimated that the Turing led team of codebreakers shortened the war by 2 to 4 years and saved millions of lives.
How it works?
Victory used computational statistics to crack the complex Enigma code and calculate the probably of successful interventions.
Potential Job in Real Estate
With the advent of cryptocurrency and a rise in data breach activities, there may be a resurrection for Victory (or a much more advanced and cloud enabled offspring,) in fighting cybercrime.
The Babbage Engine
Breakthrough Achievement
The Babbage Engine was the world’s fist computer built by Babbage, but programmed mathematically by Ada Lovelace. Yes, you read that correctly the world’s first ever computer programmer was a woman – the daughter of Lord Byron, in fact.
How it works?
It was essentially a giant manual calculator but it laid the foundation for all kinds of computational mathematics that underpin todays most advanced Ai.
Potential Job in Real Estate
There is more computing power in a primary school calculator from the 80s than was in the Babbage Engine, so this may be one that is better preserved for yesteryear.
