ChatGPT could help you find your next home

Home shopping is not for the faint of heart, especially in this economy. Using mobile apps like Zillow, however, can help make the process run a bit smoother. Now, the real estate website is announcing the integration of a new ChatGPT plugin for real estate searches.

The new addition could make home searching a less painful process, making a real estate search as easy as a conversation with the AI chatbot. Users could simply ask ChatGPT to show them listings within a set price range, ask whether a specific listing is for sale or for rent, what the bedroom and bathroom counts are, and more.

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ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI last fall, is a conversational bot based on the company's large language models, GPT-3.5 in the free version or GPT-4 for Plus users, that uses natural language processing to have text conversations with users that can feel a lot like chatting with a real human. 

People use ChatGPT to generate text for writing projects, translations, and to answer basic questions. Its versatility, however, is much more far-reaching, as it can also write code and debug it, Excel formulas, and, now, search for homes.

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Zillow is no stranger to artificial intelligence; the website has used machine learning to generate its trademark for Zestimate since 2006, employing a proprietary algorithm to calculate a home's estimated market value by combining the home's facts, location, market trends, and public, MLS, and user-submitted information. 

The company also uses AI to generate immersive floor plans for listed properties and to perform natural language searches.

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According to Zillow CTO, David Beitel, this is just the beginning, “As the first major residential real estate marketplace to bring advanced, AI-powered search to the home-shopping experience, we understand its immense potential, and we look forward to developing more tech innovations with OpenAI technology in the future.”

OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 plugins are only available for a select number of users on a waitlist basis, with plans to expand in a larger-scale over time. Right now, the Zillow ChatGPT is in its alpha phase, allowing the company to fine-tune the user experience, so it is unclear when it will be available to all users.