Real estate companies are rolling out AI assistants with human names and attributes. The tools are increasingly blurring the lines between what tech can do — and what it is
by Jim Dalrymple II
There’s Star Trek‘s Data. And HAL 9000 from 2001: A Spacey Odyssey. Scarlett Johansson memorably voiced Samantha, an artificial intelligence assistant, in Her. And the Maschinenmensch from 1927’s Metropolis is one of the most enduring images in cinema, even if most people today haven’t actually seen the movie.
Humans have been inventing machines since time immemorial, but we are perhaps most fascinated by those machines built in our own image. A car or a copy machine or a coffee maker is an object, but an android with a voice or a face? That’s a protagonist.
Recent years have seen an explosion of AI technology. Thanks to tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, smart and interactive bots that would’ve seemed like science fiction half a decade ago are now commonplace. They’re so common, in fact, that when a panelist at last month’s Inman on Tour Miami asked a room filled with real estate professionals who has used AI, virtually every hand went up.
But the proliferation of this technology has turned an abstract philosophical question into a practical one for numerous companies, including many operating in real estate: How human should our AI assistants actually be?
To answer this question, Inman reached out to multiple real estate technology companies that have built their own AI tools. And while company leaders subscribe to different philosophies, one thing was clear: AI technology is becoming more and more human. In fact, it’s becoming so real-seeming that increasingly, consumers are simply treating it like a person.
Jindou Lee used to work in video game development, but today he’s the CEO of HappyCo, a company that develops property management technology. Last year, the company unveiled its JoyAI. The tool takes requests from tenants, then helps coordinate maintenance.
Lee has spent considerable time thinking about the humanity of the bot his company has built. And he told Inman that user interactions with JoyAI suggest a certain blurriness, where users sometimes don’t appear to know if they’re engaging with a piece of technology or an actual human being.
“There are so many times where a resident would thank our AI bot," he said. "They didn't know if they were talking to a human or not.”
– Jindou Lee, HappyCo CEO
In response, HappyCo has designed some transparency into its tech. If a person asks JoyAI if it’s a human or a bot, it has the ability to answer honestly and reveal to users that it is, in fact, a digital assistant. But while Lee said that people do appreciate connections to actual humans, and no one wants to feel like they’re talking just to a computer, JoyAI users have tended to accept the machine.
“If it solves the problem, we found that people don’t really care,” he said. “If you’re a resident, you put in a ticket, you just want it to be fixed.”
A few years ago, when chatbots were more rudimentary, that might not have been the case. But today, as the technology advances, Lee expects more and more people to accept interactions with AI. And the line between humans and bots may not always be so clear.
“I think those lines,” he said, “will continue to blur.”
As Kathleen Lappe and her team at DirectOffer developed their own AI chatbot — a bot that functions as a concierge assistant in both the real estate and hospitality spaces — they wanted to find a name for the tech. Lappe recently told Inman the team discovered that the names Noah and Olivia were the two most common English names at the time, so they settled on the latter.
“We felt OLIVIA rolled off the mouth,” Lappe said, “And then we built an acronym after OLIVIA, so it just hit the right spot.”In choosing OLIVIA — which also presents itself with a human face and is described internally as “her” — DirectOffer was following in the footsteps of many other companies that have consistently chosen female names for their bots. Amazon, for example, has Alexa. Apple’s phones all come with Siri. And once upon a time, Microsoft built a bot named Cortana.
This preference for female names is common in real estate as well. Aside from OLIVIA, there’s DealMachine’s Alma, lead nurturing bot Gabbi.AI, and voice-based AI rent collector Colleen. There are exceptions, too, but the trend toward female names for AI assistants is clear.
In the case of OLIVIA, Lappe said that users simply tended to respond better to female names.
“In general, women don’t have a problem with women giving instructions to them,” Lappe said. “And men are more comfortable with women guiding them.”
Lee made a similar point, saying that in his company’s research, “People responded better to female names than male names” — hence “JoyAI.”
The trend toward female names for virtual assistants is so common that researchers have actually looked into the topic. A 2019 report from UNESCO, for example, argued that feminized voices are a relatively recent phenomenon and that they raise questions about potential gender biases in technology. But perhaps most critically, the report suggests that the naming and gendering of AI is further blurring the lines between real and simulated people.
“As emotive voice technology improves,” the report states, “the ability to distinguish between human and machine voices will decrease and, in time, probably disappear entirely.”
In a similar vein, a 2021 paper looked at this question and acknowledged that past investigations suggested female-voiced bots are common because they’re perceived as being warmer. But the researchers actually suggested there’s something deeper going on.
“We argue that people prefer female bots because they are perceived as more human than male bots,” the researchers found.
In other words, it’s not so much that people like women’s voices more. It’s that those voices are nudging them further into the gray zone between machine and human.
While the bots generally seem to be racing toward personhood, not every company is trying to make them seem human. Michael Martin, CEO of real estate virtual assistant company Sidekick, said his company has taken a very different approach and intentionally chooses not to anthropomorphize their tech. Sidekick’s assistants are simply and fittingly called “Sidekicks.”
“It reinforces this kind of false humanity of an AI that I think stokes fears of human replacement,” Martin told Inman of naming bots. “Which I think in real estate is particularly pronounced in many cases. I think it’s really important, as AI becomes more ubiquitous, that the human-computer interaction always remains clear.”
Martin has followed other companies’ moves to anthropomorphize AI and speculated that such choices are done to make the tools more relatable. But his vision for the future of the technology is something different. It’s a vision in which artificial intelligence becomes “more of a substrate” embedded in some other machine — say, a car or a fridge — than a friendly aide with a name or face. In this future, a bot might not actually need a name at all.
In the end, it may not be entirely an either-or between Martin’s vision and what other companies like DirectOffer are creating. But either way, it’s clear that going forward, technology will be increasingly able to do something that we’ve long associated with living beings: Act on its own.
“There’s a world very soon,” Martin said, “where two agents working together on a deal, that experience is better because both of them have a Sidekick, and those Sidekicks can interact without the agent needing to.”
Lindsey Henn, HappyCo PR
E: lindsey.henn@happy.co
M: +1 (626) 893-42298
