LandlordAId: AI-Powered Assistance for Landlords

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our latest innovation, helping landlords and agents in England and Wales: LandlordAId Chatbot. The AI in AId stands for Artificial Intelligence.

You can find the service by clicking the bubble at the bottom right of every page.

LandlordAId is an artificial intelligence chatbot which utilises OpenAI's ChatGPT in the background to analyse natural language input and provide responses from content on our website. Natural language models like ChatGPT have revolutionised the way chatbots and AI services interact with users, providing a more human-like experience and understanding of context better than ever before.

It is a competent service; if the answer is somewhere on the website, there's a good chance of a decent response.

It's perfect for technical support and account queries such as Tenancy Builder, digital signing, finding invoices etc. It's also very good at answering landlord/tenant questions, and we're getting better at training it to ensure it refuses to answer if it doesn't know. We'd rather have no answer than a wrong answer!

How does LandlordAId Chatbot work?

LandlordAId is one of the most complex things we've ever undertaken, mainly because much of the technology is brand new, with limited resources on figuring out how to get the best from the recent natural language models.

There are two models used for LandlordAId. If you're not logged in or a guest, we utilise an older model called GPT-3.5. Although this model is relatively fast and inexpensive, it doesn't follow instructions well so that responses can be unpredictable.

When you're logged in (or confirm your subscription when prompted), we use GPT-4, which we are privileged to be testing on an invitation basis. GPT-4 is the latest iteration of ChatGPT, and its API is not available to the general public at the time of this article. Its responses are much more accurate than GPT-3.5, but processing and receiving the response takes much longer and is much more expensive for us to use.

All our years of content had to be converted into embeddings so we could conduct a vector search from the text you input when asking a question. This means that all our text has now been converted into numbers (millions and millions of numbers), and when we search, we search against numbers, not words. This was a massive operation! Soon we will be expanding its knowledge to include trusted external sources.

When you ask a question, it's not a keyword search like Google; the system understands meanings and context exceptionally well. This is one of the significant benefits of natural language models like ChatGPT. They can understand the nuances of human language and provide more accurate and relevant responses, making the user experience much more seamless and enjoyable.

Services available

At the time of launch, there are three services available, and more are intended to follow:

• Ask a question - ask any question a customer typically asks, including technical support, account or landlord/tenant queries.
• Write/check an email - the system will write an email given a few prompts as to what's required. For example, you might type, "Ask the tenant to stop leaving items in the communal hallway". You can also paste an already written email; it will look to improve it if it can.
• Write/check additional terms - sometimes landlords want a specific tenancy term which might not be included by default in a tenancy agreement. With as much or little prompt as you wish, the system will provide three variations of a term or check one already written. We have trained LandlordAId as best we can on unfair terms (Consumer Rights Act 2005) and the tenant fees ban.

Our roadmap for development is a service to generate property descriptions for online advertising portals.

How to get the most out of LandlordAId Chatbot

There are some simple rules to follow, and you'll get the most relevant responses possible.

The most important rule is only to ask one question at a time. For example, you may have a tenant in rent arrears and want to serve notice. The same tenant might also refuse access to a gas safety inspection. This would be two different questions even though it's the same tenant, and in some instances, you could argue connected. It's important because we run a search to find the most relevant results from all our content. If there are multiple topics, this narrows down the amount of text we can feed ChatGPT to answer the question correctly. ChatGPT has limited words we can utilise.

Other tips include:

• You don't have to worry too much about keywords, although they help.
• Speak naturally, as you would ask in an email. LandlordAId is capable of understanding natural language and context. This is another significant benefit of natural language models, as they can process and respond to human language in a way that feels more conversational and intuitive for users.
• Keep to the point and try to keep the question relevant.
• Don't lead an answer in the question (e.g. if asking what notice to serve, don't suggest what you think might be right - the assistant will often agree to be polite).
• Be patient! Some requests can take a while, especially during busy periods. We expect a result within 60 seconds. Anything longer, something may have gone wrong.

Conclusion

In conclusion, LandlordAId Chatbot, powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT, is an innovative tool designed to assist landlords and letting agents in England and Wales. By leveraging the latest advancements in natural language models, LandlordAId can provide more accurate, relevant, and human-like responses to users' queries, making it an invaluable resource for anyone in the industry.