Using Amazon’s Alexa for Real Estate Training

Real estate professionals typically have to be in a classroom in order to partake in necessary company trainings or continuing education classes. But that’s not the case anymore. I’ve been working on programming Amazon’s Alexa, an artificial intelligence personal assistant, with skills that include real estate terms, office policies, educational quizzes, Women’s Council of REALTORS®, and other functions for brokerages.

Alexa is commanding a significant share of the market for voice-enabled assistants—as much as 82 percent compared to Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft Cortana, according to a recent survey by Voicebot.ai. Not only will Alexa help with training agents, it can serve as an on-the-go resource.

Real estate practitioners need to be able to pull up answers fast and be prepared when customers have specific questions. Agents can also use Alexa as they’re commuting between appointments to locate an mp3 file from their sales coach, for instance.

The AI device gives real estate companies the ability to structure categorical, sequential, and rote knowledge on demand so that agents are better prepared to serve today’s “information now” customer. Brokers can simply log into their Amazon account, enable the skill, and start asking Alexa about the same topics they use to educate their agents in a typical training course. Or they can build their own custom skills.

I firmly believe this is the start of a revolution in training delivery for real estate. It’s up to the forward-thinking real estate brokers to start transferring their expertise to a user-friendly technology that recognizes the sound of their own voice.

There are recent claims that artificial intelligence will dramatically decrease the number of real estate professionals in the industry. I disagree. Alexa will never replace a real estate agent in the transaction; it will only enhance the customer’s experience.