Keller Williams today announced a partnership with artificial intelligence services company KUNGFU.AI to develop a new, contract-reading skill for Kelle, the brokerage’s artificial intelligence-based personal assistant.
The skill will use computer vision technology to rapidly scan PDF-based real estate contracts that contain a mix of typed and handwritten text, identify and extract important business insights and deliver them to agents via Kelle into KW Command, a smart CRM-plus platform.
“With KUNGFU.AI, we’re adding top experts and leaders in the field of artificial intelligence to our strong internal development team,” said KW Chief Product Officer Neil Dholakia in a press release. “We’re rapidly accelerating and bringing more and more value through our proprietary technology to empower agents to provide the best consumer experience.”
“Through this partnership, we will bring a highly anticipated new Kelle skill to our agents fast,” added Dholakia while noting the skill will be available in Q4 2018.
Keller Williams lead data scientist Kevin Johnson told Inman that in the broadest sense, computer vision technology enables computers to ‘see’ and ‘interpret’ images and documents in the same way a human can — just faster.
With this technology, agents will be able to upload their documents directly to the Kelle app, and then the skill will be able to extract important pieces of information from a contract, such as the closing price, and share them with the agent in less than a minute.
Beyond Kelle, Johnson says the computer vision technology provided by KUNGFU.AI will enable the brokerage to quickly generate collections of data that will help agents better track overall market and individual property changes.
KUNGFU.AI Chief Technical Officer Ron Green confirmed Johnson’s statement by saying his company’s work on Kelle is only the beginning.
“Due to size, Keller Williams has access to the largest proprietary data sets in the real estate industry, rolled up inside of its Keller Cloud. In the new world of AI, where the importance of data is paramount, they are aggressively taking advantage of their position in the market,” said Green in a prepared statement. “For our first project together, we’re taking a practical approach toward a narrow use case to quickly move the needle and will then look to drive ever greater impact from there.”
This is the second major upgrade Kelle has gotten since its initial launch in February 2018. In August, Kelle debuted Snaps, skill that provides a map-based detailed profile of a neighborhood based on borders gleaned from the homeowner social network, Nextdoor.
The app currently has a monthly active user count of 97,000, and Keller Williams President and CEO John Davis said Kelle played a large role in the company’s second-quarter growth.
Beyond Kelle, Keller Williams has been making good on founder Gary Keller’s vision of making his namesake into a technology company. On Sept. 5, the brokerage announced the acquisition of mobile-first platform SmarterAgent and plans to use the company’s capabilities to a consumer-facing app that will be released in 2019.
“We are building the end-to-end platform for real estate,” Keller Williams Chief Innovation Officer Josh Team told Inman. “SmarterAgent, our agent’s branded mobile app, will be connected in real-time with their database, marketing plans and Kelle, our AI, as part of an all-in-one system, allowing Keller Williams agents to simplify their life and focus on providing the best consumer experience.”
