Voice input search is coming to online search, and by extension, to real estate search.
Remember the Yellow Pages mantra, “Let your fingers do the walking” ? Well, consumers will let their voices do the walking with voice enabled search. Rather than typing into the Google or Yahoo box, folks searching for a home, or anything else, will just ask what they’re looking for.
Google was recently granted a patent for its Google Voice Search.
This technology is working its way to you via mobile devices like your cellphone, iPhone and Blackberry. What’s great is the mobile devices use GPS to give map based results . So, imagine you can drive a neighborhood, speak a property search and get the results on a map, with links to the home listings. (Heck, you can then drive by the house, point your iPhone at the bar coded For Sale sign to get more information on the home (and contact info) and then call the agent to see the home.)
The following applications accept voice input and return Web results:
Microsoft’s TellMe (video demo link)
Yahoo’s OneSearch (Press Release April 2008)
Sprint’s V-Enable (Press Release April 2008) (Check out the Mobile411 video here.)
By adopting this technology, a real estate website will set itself apart from the competition. Imagine the clout of Realtor.com and the local MLS with this application for consumers?
See you in the future.
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Technorati Tags: search, technology, real estate search, marketing, real estate marketing
This is a pretty interesting technology, I’m curious to see how different companies will start taking advantage of this.
Mobile phone + GPS + this for real estate shopping sounds like a great way to do it!
That’s really cool. Anything that cuts down on the huge loading times some real estate sites have is great. It seems like you could already use the iPhone for real estate listings without needing a voice search. The iPhone has Google Maps and a GSP feature like you said, but why not just utilize the technology now by having the nearby listings pop-up on the map based on your GPS position? It’s a lot easier and cheaper than waiting for voice technology to be fine tuned.
That’s very cool and needed. The next big step would be a true “speech-to-text” for emails from a PDA. Did your research turn up anything on that type of technology?
Dan
Jott has speech to text for emails, which works fine.
http://jott.com/
I posted on Jott here:
http://tinyurl.com/2l38cm