WE GET AROUND NETWORK WGAN-TV Live at 5 Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up Thursday, February 15, 2024
“Whether you’re a real estate photographer; a real estate agent; a real estate broker; a plumber; an installer; a repair person; anyone that is missing out on appointments; small businesses that are missing out on money every time that they get a message that they can’t respond to; nights; weekends; holidays; while they’re in the midst of a service visit; then Oppy can be helping you make money even when you can’t pick up and interact with a potential customer directly.”
Dan Smigrod
Founder and Managing Editor We Get Around Network | WGAN-TV www.WeGetAroundNetwork.com
WGAN-TV Guest
Alex Gustafson Founder and CEO
Oppy
www.Oppy.Pro
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone and Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up with Oppy Founder and CEO Alex Gustafson | Thursday, 15 February 2024 | Episode #210 | www.Oppy.Pro
- Do you have potential clients calling you at night, weekends and holidays? - Do you miss out on business because you were not available to answer the phone? - Do you wish there was an easier way to schedule photo shoots? Stay tuned. Hi all, I’m Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, February 15th, 2024. You’re watching WGAN-TV Live at 5: a podcast for digital twin creators shaping the future of real estate today. We have an awesome show for you! Introduction to Oppy: a 24/7 Phone and Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up. Our subject matter expert is Oppy Founder and CEO Alex Gustafson. Alex, thanks for being back on the show. - Of course, yeah. Thanks for having me, Dan. Pleasure to be on. - Alex, before we jump into Oppy, tell us a little bit about you and your background. - Yeah, so my background, I started a little over 10 years ago as a real estate photographer and quickly built that business out and scaled it up as we began offering video and Matterport and other services like that. And it killed me to be working so hard, but come out of an appointment and realize I had a text message from a client or a missed call from a client. And by the time I got back to them, sometimes, especially for newer clients that we didn’t have rapport with, they might’ve booked another provider but I didn’t get back to them quick enough. And so a lot of our pain points with the real estate photography business led to developing our own tools and software to help streamline the booking and the customer support process and make a better experience for both me, my team, and also our customers, obviously.
“Whether you’re a real estate photographer; a real estate agent; a real estate broker; a plumber; an installer; a repair person; anyone that is missing out on appointments; small businesses that are missing out on money every time that they get a message that they can’t respond to; nights; weekends; holidays; while they’re in the midst of a service visit; then Oppy can be helping you make money even when you can’t pick up and interact with a potential customer directly.”
Dan Smigrod
Founder and Managing Editor We Get Around Network | WGAN-TV www.WeGetAroundNetwork.com
- And the big picture on Oppy? - So Oppy, the big picture is, currently within about five minutes, you can come away with an intern or better level assistant that will be with you forever. So it will never forget anything. It’ll keep learning forever and ever. And so the big picture is really a 24/7 phone assistant for your
Page 2 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
small business to help increase your sales or decrease your own pain so you can actually have a life and not be on your phone all the time and handle a lot of the challenges that you have in your day-to-day. - So for real estate photographers, how does that translate? What kind of pain points do real estate photographers have that Oppy solves? - Yeah, so in addition to just what I mentioned about my own, the average busy real estate photographer can shoot, I think, up to like eight houses in a day. And with driving around that much, you’re bound to miss some messages. And you’re also on the road, obviously, driving between appointments on your calendar in the future. And the scheduling is a challenge too. So it’s not as simple as just picking up the phone and saying, “Oh, hey, yes, I can do that appointment,” or, “No, I can’t,” because you actually have to do some routing and some more things like that. So Oppy is able to help real estate photographers, especially because it does take into account drive times in the future, and it does help you capture those leads. I think I read a stat recently about 70% of customers want to text with brands that they interact with, but only about 30% of brands actually offer that. And it’s most likely just because it’s hard to offer text message support, just like it’s hard to offer actual live chat support. And also, if you don’t respond to your lead within about five minutes, your odds of capturing that lead go down by about 80%. So very bad statistics for an entire business of road warriors, essentially, who may or may not have cell service or the ability to hop on their phone and send a text message right away, because you might be flying a drone or using it for your Matterport and your battery is about to die, whatever the case may be. So Oppy’s there to help out. And with a lot of our tools that obviously we’ll get into, it’s not as scary as it might seem to be, it shouldn’t have to feel like you’re just giving it away to AI. We have a you-in-the-loop dashboard. So even if it’s you or your customer support person, you can watch the conversations happen and you’re always there to jump in or pause or whatever you need to do. - So Alex, chatbots have been around for a long time, a few years at least. And I always think of them as horrible experiences. What makes Oppy AI Assistant Chatbot way better than menu-driven chatbots that we all have experienced? - Yeah, I would agree that chatbots have a terrible reputation and with the exception of maybe Smarter Child or some of the earlier ones, but actually getting them to do something useful, it’s been a very painstaking process of these IVR trees is what they’re called and building out the flows of if this, then that, and all of this. And so obviously with ChatGPT and a lot of other tools that have come out in the last year or so, it’s really transformed how that works. And it’s allowed for much more nuanced conversations to happen without a tremendous amount of overhead on your business to retrain a certain thing just because you added a new product. We’ve made it super simple on our end to easily import your website and you can give it some knowledge in terms of how you would talk to an assistant. You don’t have to know how to code. So think of, oh, “I don’t like that your responses are super-long. Can you make your responses shorter?” That’s what you might say to an actual assistant. That’s all you need to say to your Oppy and it’ll adjust its responses going forward. So looking at chatbots 18 months ago and earlier, you couldn’t do that. And now that we have this new technology, I truly believe that natural language is the operating system of the future and the user interface of the future is going to simplify a lot of things for us because it’s just what we do naturally, obviously. So yes, it’s very impressive. It’s fluent in over 20 languages. It is, I think it passes the bar in like the 90th percentile or something like that. I wouldn’t use it as your lawyer, but thinking about that working for you, how that’ll evolve with your business in its head as the company it works for has made things a lot better for people and has made Oppy really a great product. And I’m impressed by it every day. - So it sounds like Oppy is powered by ChatGPT? - In a way, yeah. So ChatGPT is like the product of OpenAI, their user interface ... we actually use their APIs. And so we do use some of OpenAI’s APIs to power Oppy. And then we use some of our own that we’ve been building to really fine tune it on your business specifically. And so it’s like a modified ChatGPT that you actually have control over from a business perspective. So you can customize how it acts, how it responds. It’s your brand voice, something you can make consistent, all of those things. And then you can easily hook it up to a phone number in a matter of a few clicks so that it can start engaging with customers and
Page 3 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
capturing what they want, what they need, their contact info, things like that. So that when they reach out, you keep building on that list over and over. And so its knowledge base of what each customer wants and needs keeps growing. So that’s where that bit that I said in the beginning about it working for you basically forever really comes in is as you see it, start really building a profile on your customers and what they like, what they don’t like, all those things over time. - So Alex, I’ve had some amazing conversations with ChatGPT-4, for example, and I love it. And I find the experience amazing. And I think of it as magic every time I use it. Is that kind of the feel or the leap forward of going from those chatbots of 2+ years ago that were just this, then that kind of conversations to literally a magical experience as if you’re talking to ChatGPT-4? - Yes, absolutely. I mean, it’s just, you’re enthusiastic about it and so am I, I use it almost every day. And seeing it interact with customers is a little nerve wracking at first maybe, but then you start seeing the responses and you’ve talked to my own Oppy, Sloan, and it’s, I’m always really impressed, so it’s a very similar interface for people but we make it familiar with them too because it’s a phone number. So they have a phone that can text like everybody. They don’t have to learn how to like to go to your site, find your chat button and start talking to you. They just send a text message to your phone that you give out and it’ll start the conversation. - I am familiar a little bit with ChatGPT-4 and it does enable you to create your own chatbots. Is there any reason I shouldn’t just use ChatGPT-4 to create my text-based chatbot for my business? Or is there some magic that Oppy, your company, is providing that sits on top of the AI to make the magic happen specifically for real estate photographers, service provider businesses? - Yeah, the latter. And you could probably do a handful of the things that we do with ChatGPT’s GPTs as their product. But our, and our goal is not to rebuild ChatGPT or compete with OpenAI because we would lose pretty quickly. Our goal is to just leverage the technology and bring it all together in a format that works for small businesses. And that’s what we’ve really done. So when I think about ChatGPT, it’s great for me to use it. And, Microsoft Copilot, you’ve seen ads on Super Bowl and everything else like that. They’re great.
“Whether you’re a real estate photographer; a real estate agent; a real estate broker; a plumber; an installer; a repair person; anyone that is missing out on appointments; small businesses that are missing out on money every time that they get a message that they can’t respond to; nights; weekends; holidays; while they’re in the midst of a service visit; then Oppy can be helping you make money even when you can’t pick up and interact with a potential customer directly.”
Dan Smigrod
Founder and Managing Editor We Get Around Network | WGAN-TV www.WeGetAroundNetwork.com
But if you actually want that to interact with customers, how would you even really do that? There’s not an easy way to kick that off. So you might be able to cobble together some ways to do it. But I really think that’s where our human-in-the-loop dashboard shines and the phone numbers are hooked up. I don’t think ChatGPT will ever enable the ability to add and manage a phone number onto your account because there’s a lot of regulations and things like that that we kind of waded through. But above and beyond that, we have our scheduling algorithm that does take into account the future drive times and all of that. So it’ll make sure that you actually have time to get from where you’re going to or from where you’re going to be to where the proposed appointment is, provide the service and variable amount of time based on the square footage or whatever else, and then get to wherever you’re supposed to go after that. And we have a lot of advanced features that I think we’ve added since the last time I talked to you that allow you to do even more filtering there. - Let’s do this, Alex, if you don’t mind. - Yeah. - Let me pretend to be a real estate agent and let’s just pretend that I’m sending you a text. We’ll do it by voice. Later in the show, we’ll share screens and I’ll do the same conversation showing what I see. And then I’ll ask you to show your screen to see what you see as the photographer. But I think I just like to go through this by voice for a moment, because I think it’s going to tee up me asking you follow-up
Page 4 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
questions about, “well, how to do that.” All right? - Okay. - So let’s just super-simple conversation. Let’s just pretend I’m a real estate [Agent]. I’m a real estate agent. And gee, maybe I need a persona here. Why don’t we say Danny Boy? So I’m Danny Boy and I’m a real estate agent. You’re a real estate photographer. I’ve done some work with you before and I sent you a text and it says, actually, I’m going to do this with your assistant, Andy Brinker. No, actually, we’ll do it as Alex. Just like no AI involved here, just you and me having a conversation. Hey, Alex, how are you doing? - I’m great, Dan. How can I help you today? Are you looking to book an appointment? - Yes, actually, I have a listing coming up. I’d like to schedule a photo shoot. Can you help me with that, Alex? - Of course. What services are you looking for? Photos? Video? Matterport? And, also do you have the square footage and listing price so that we can look up some times? - Yeah, actually, all the services you’ve mentioned. So I would like some photos, a Matterport digital twin, floor plans, and I do also need aerial and it’s a 3,500 square foot house. - Okay, great. And do you have the address that you mind providing? - I do. It’s 391 West Paces Ferry Road, NW, Atlanta, Georgia 30305. - Okay, great. So it looks like the services will come out to $349. (I think that’s probably way too cheap, but it’s not a real number. You’ll see that on the chat.) And I’ll look up some availability for you. Can I have your email address just so I can send you an appointment? - Sure, it’s: dan@we-get-around.com - Okay, great. It looks like we have time next week on the 19th at 10 a.m., on the 20th at 11:30 a.m., and on the 22nd at 2 p.m. Do any of those work for you? - Yes, actually 10 a.m. on Monday, February 19th would be awesome. - Okay, great. I just confirmed the booking and you should see it on your calendar now. I invited you to it. And if you have anything else that you need, just let us know. - Awesome. So sort of kind of a conversation just two people would have where you’re scheduling. But let me break that down because I have a lot of questions. So if we’re doing that with Andy Brinker, your Oppy AI assistant that we’ll do in a moment, how does Andy know what times and days are available? - Yeah, so essentially it uses our API, our algorithm that we built to scan your calendar in the future or open time slots. And then it uses all the addresses on your calendar, appointments in the future to calculate the drive times and then figure out if you can actually get there, provide the service you need to do and then get to wherever else you need to go. And then it does a whole bunch of other things. It’s all proprietary to us that we’ve built out just out of necessity, but just trying to make it more efficient. And by the time it gets back to the end user or in this case, Andy Brinker’s Oppy, it just picks out the best times based on whatever you’ve told your assistant that you want to look for and then whatever your filters are. And it spits those to you, Dan. And if you were to say, no, that doesn’t work, it might have already generated 50 time slots that do work. And we told it to just maybe give you like three of the best looking ones to not overwhelm you. So it might just give you a few more options or it might actually look at different days and scan for more availability. - So let me see if I can break that down a little bit further, granular. So when I connect it to my calendar or you, you’re the photographer, I’ll stay in my real estate agent mode here. You as the photographer are connecting Oppy to your Google Calendar. - Correct, yes. - And some of the secret sauce, I happen to be in Atlanta. And I guess if I was a photographer, I could have a shoot in Atlanta at 9 a.m. on Monday.
Page 5 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
I could have another shoot in Alpharetta, conceivably during, drive time could be an hour away. And if we’re scheduling a shoot in Atlanta rather than Alpharetta, Oppy is actually looking at my calendar and making some decisions to say, proposed times for this Atlanta shoot that are either perhaps before or immediately before or immediately after the shoot that’s in Atlanta rather than in Alpharetta, where I might have a scheduling day that takes me from Atlanta to Alpharetta to Atlanta and back to someplace else that’s an hour away. So you’re trying to optimize my schedule. Is that ... badly said? Is that sort of what’s happening? - Yeah, no, you kind of nailed it. I mean, I don’t really need to expand much more on it. That’s what it does. And obviously you don’t want to lose the booking. So there are some cool things that we’ve developed, especially with this natural language kind of interface, this chat interface that is pretty good at reasoning. We’re able to pass it some information and tell it things like, “hey, only try to suggest these appointments. But if they really press, we don’t want to lose the sale. So offer these other ones.” Maybe you really never want to get booked on a Friday, but you’re leaving your calendar open. If somebody really wants to book you on a Friday, you could say, “even if I’m available on Friday, please don’t suggest that I’m booked on Friday because I like to edit or whatever, or not work till late at night.” And so it’ll try to suggest Thursday or Monday or whatever else. And then if they’re like, “no, I really need to do it on Friday,” it’ll say, “okay, well, we do have these times.” But to, sorry, one more thing, just to go back to your original point, we developed another piece of proprietary element of our algorithm this year that we implemented called Snappiness. And what that is, is a measure of how likely the appointments are to snap into one another, but also how efficient they are. It’s kind of like an efficiency score. So if you get a whole list of appointments back and you set your Snappiness to only give the top 50%, then it’s going to take all of your available appointments that were spit back and it’ll then cut those in half and only return the 50%. And so if you keep dropping that or raising whatever you want to say, if you say, I only want the top 10% of appointments to come back. So now if you had 10 appointments, it’ll pick the top number one appointment to send back to the person.
“Whether you’re a real estate photographer; a real estate agent; a real estate broker; a plumber; an installer; a repair person; anyone that is missing out on appointments; small businesses that are missing out on money every time that they get a message that they can’t respond to; nights; weekends; holidays; while they’re in the midst of a service visit; then Oppy can be helping you make money even when you can’t pick up and interact with a potential customer directly.”
Dan Smigrod
Founder and Managing Editor We Get Around Network | WGAN-TV www.WeGetAroundNetwork.com
I mean, that’s a little restrictive, but you get the point. So that’s all based on your either combined drive time and some other measures that really make sure it’s optimal for you. - Well, that leads me to the follow-up question. You say drive time. So if I’m talking to you right now about availability for appointments, perhaps you’re mentally doing a calculation about, oh, well, you’re based in Roswell for this scenario, let’s say you’re based in Roswell, Georgia, and it takes you an hour to get to the shoot at 9 a.m. You’re doing that calculation in your head where going from Roswell to Atlanta late at night may only take 20 minutes. So how does your AI Assistant, Andy Brinker, your Oppy, know how much time to allow for driving to that appointment at 9 a.m.? - That’s what it does. I mean, that’s what we’ve built. We’ve been using it for years and it works really well. I mean, we used to have two people basically doing dispatching full-time. And now we just use this algorithm. So it’s really good. I mean, it’s very good. - So this is what you described as traffic-aware and it literally knows how to use historical traffic data, presumably some API from Google Maps, I’m guessing, in order to calculate what is a reasonable amount of time to allocate for drive time? - Yeah, yeah. So it’ll do that. I mean, like when you open your Waze app, I know Waze has it, Google has it too. You see the little bar chart, how long the drive is at each hour. If we were to put a visualization to it, that’s kind of how it would look when it comes back. But we also add in a bunch of other things based on your personal preferences of how you might want to prioritize each one of those slots. So, but yeah, that’s pretty much how it works.
Page 6 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
So, because like when we built this originally, we had a need because we’re in a city and we had photographers driving from either inside the city to outside or outside of the city to in. And let’s say you’re outside of a major city like Atlanta is one for sure. You could be half an hour outside of the city at 9 p.m. but if you were to have to go into the city at 9 a.mIt might take you an hour and a half. So that’s a major difference. And you want to be able to not prioritize those appointments or not show them because that’s what a human scheduler would do. They would say, hey, “let’s get you on this one because I’m actually going to be in the area already” or “hey, let’s move you to 11 a.m. because we don’t want to sit in traffic.” They’re not going to say that to the customer, but that’s how ... that’s the thought process that went into building this algorithm. - So Oppy, a little bit magic-like, takes into account drive-time traffic. So it’s looked at your schedule. It knows where you already have existing shoots. It knows some of the rules about don’t book me on Fridays unless it’s absolutely necessary. And it’s looking at your Google calendar. It’s calculating the drive time. It’s suggesting optimized appointments just before, just after. That kind of leads me to, okay, but how did it know how long it’s going to take you to shoot photos, Matterport, generate floor plans and aerial? - Yeah, so there are a variety of ways. We have some more strict kinds of the ways that we’ve done in the past. You fill out a form and it’ll tell it how many minutes per 1,000 square feet, I believe is what the input is. - I told them 3,500 square feet. So is that the piece that you needed to do the calculation? - Yeah, that’s primarily what it’s for. Yeah, but I know a lot of people do their pricing based off of square footage and/or listing price or whatever else. So with Oppy though, you don’t necessarily need to put in or you don’t need to fill out a form if your services aren’t supercomplicated. If they are super-complicated, we have forms and things that you can go through and the UI that we built to like actually buildout your services. but what we’ve seen is if you import your services page and maybe a spreadsheet that contains how long each service takes, what the price is for each service, it should do a really good job. If it doesn’t, that’s where you can come to us and we’ll get you set up with the UI to actually build-out the services and then those will actually like to do everything, make sure it’s correct. But yeah, I mean, based on this demo one that we made for Andy Brinker, I can’t say I put in great information about the pricing, but it did a pretty good job with calculating the duration of the appointment, I think, and the pricing and everything. - And I think you’ve mentioned something that kind of takes us into this next topic of, well, how does Andy Brinker, your Oppy for your business, even know about your business, the services that you offer? - Yeah, so that’s the first step when you sign up. Pretty much the first thing you do is it pops up and it says, “Hey, Dan, I’m Zephyr.” This one’s name was Zephyr, Andy’s assistant. You can change that obviously, but I’m Zephyr, your assistant, and I work for Andy Brinker. And so you can change that. You can have it say BrinkerPics or Team Pup & Suds. But so when you set that up, then you go in to teach it, set goals, and there are a variety of different ways you can fine tune it as time goes on and you talk to it more or your customers talk to it more. I mean, you asked mine for our media kit and things like that for this webinar. And that was something I never thought to train on. - Let me parenthetically say what I did there. When I booked Alex to be on the show, I know he’s super-busy and I really needed the information right away, of course, in order to write up a description for the We Get Around Network Forum promoting what was coming up on today’s show. So rather than texting to Alex and asking some questions to prep for the show, I actually just texted Andy Brinker, his AI assistant, and said things like, “Hey Andy, what would be 10 good questions to ask Alex?” Boom, here comes 10 questions. I said, “Well, how about another 10 questions?” So then it comes back, I have 20 questions, but I look at the questions and I go, “Oh, well, they’re kind of like, they kind of should be grouped by category.” So I say, “Andy, can you reorganize those questions by category?”
Page 7 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
And then boom, I get back another text and it says, “Here are categories and here’s the questions grouped by categories.” I said, “Great, I need a bio of Alex.” Boom, here comes back Alex’s bio. I said, “Well, can you give me a paragraph that describes Oppy?” Boom, here comes back that paragraph. So I thought, let’s see, well, I said, “Oh, I’d like to get a demo with Alex before the show.” Great, here’s some days and times next week. That would have been [last week]. I said, “Great, I’ll take the one that’s on Friday. That works for me.” Actually, Alex is in San Clemente, California, he’s on the West Coast. So when I asked Oppy for some times to visit, it came back and suggested some dates, but it actually gave me the times in Pacific time and I’m in an Eastern time zone. So I then said, “Oh, well, can you give me those times and days based on Eastern time?” Boom, it came back and it gave it the times that were meaningful for my time zone. Okay, I said, “Great, I’ll take that.” I think it was the 2:30 p.m. Friday, February 9th appointment that worked for me. I think that’s what it actually was. And then the only thing I think Oppy got stuck on is I said, “I need a headshot of Alex. Do you have that?” And then what happened? - That’s when I was watching it. It was like all popping up on my watch and my text messages. That’s when I jumped in and paused it and I looked for a headshot. And it’s just sent you the link through the Oppy itself. So yeah, I was watching what it was saying and I was really impressed because it would have taken me a couple of days to get all that stuff back to you probably because I’m pretty bad with email. - So I was happy because I was able to ask Alex’s assistant everything I needed in order to write-up promoting today’s episode without Alex’s intervention, except when I asked for a headshot. And then Alex, I guess you would call that what human intervention option? There’s probably a name for it. Human assist, human-in-the-loop. That’s what I would call it. - Yeah, that’s what we call it. You in the loop. - You in the loop. So in the event that you are watching the conversation go by, you can inject yourself as a live person into the conversation in order to answer a question. But truly I was amazed because I got everything I needed from Alex’s Andy Brinker, which is his Oppy. So let’s see if I can remember where we were when I parenthetically inserted that. So I’m not sure that I remember. Do you remember Alex? Might have to ask Oppy this question. :)
“Whether you’re a real estate photographer; a real estate agent; a real estate broker; a plumber; an installer; a repair person; anyone that is missing out on appointments; small businesses that are missing out on money every time that they get a message that they can’t respond to; nights; weekends; holidays; while they’re in the midst of a service visit; then Oppy can be helping you make money even when you can’t pick up and interact with a potential customer directly.”
Dan Smigrod
Founder and Managing Editor We Get Around Network | WGAN-TV www.WeGetAroundNetwork.com
- You were talking about how we’re training it on a business and what you’re trying to- Yes, so I think what you were describing was that you first train it on your website and then you might add a link or links to your website. If you have pricing in a spreadsheet, upload a PDF, I presume, of the spreadsheet. - You could just link it to a Google Sheet if you want. - Link it to a Google Sheet. So anything that you have that’s written about your business which is typically going to be anything that’s public is typically going to be on your website or it’s in some other document for sharing like a Google Sheet. So that’s how Oppy knows how to answer questions is, let’s say, both what the AI is used to in terms of, to simplify it, for any of those who have used GPT, if GPT knows how to answer a question, all you’re doing is training it on your business in particular. - Yes, exactly. - Okay, so we’ll look at that in terms of sharing screens. I’m just thinking about other things. Just when we went through that conversation, we covered how it knew your schedule, how it knew how long each individual service took, it knew your, let’s say your availability, it knew about the services, it was able to price out the project, it knew about traffic. What other things was Oppy doing in our short verbal conversation that we have? - The coolest thing I think it did was actually the next morning, I was sitting on my computer, and you can just watch it, so I have my other monitor here, and when I hear it, it makes a little click noise, I just put it on my other screen, and I’m just watching it talk to you, and you sent it a picture, and I saw the picture pop-up on the screen, and then it goes analyzing image, and it looks at the picture, and you asked, “is it okay, this layout, or the color,” or whatever you asked, and it immediately got back, and it made
Page 8 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
a pretty good executive decision for the both of us, and it agreed that you made the right choice by omitting some things. And I couldn’t believe that, I mean, because the image stuff is pretty new, I think it might only even be enabled for my personal account or admins, the pro account, but yeah, that one was pretty impressive, and so there are a lot of other features like that, that we’re continuing to build out, you even saw extracting text from an image. - That was cool. I guess the other thing is, you didn’t actually say it to me in our dialogue, but I imagine, oh, maybe you did, did you say, and you calendared me on the photo shoot day and time? - Yes. - Just as a person, you would send me an email to confirm, and you’d probably send a text to confirm, so is Oppy doing that as well, sending an email and a text to confirm the appointment? - Right now, it doesn’t do email, but it’ll do a text, so I mean, obviously, you’re in the thread, so it’ll say your appointment is confirmed, that’s your confirmation text right there, and both parties have access to that, so there’s no real reason to send a formal confirmation, but it does send the Google Calendar invite, and so even if you’re using iCal or something like that, if you invite somebody to that with the email they gave you, it’ll add it to their calendar. - All right, well, let’s do a demo, why don’t we assume that I am a real estate agent in Atlanta, and my persona is I’m Danny Boy from ABC Real Estate Agency in Atlanta. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen so you can see my text window here. I’ve written, “Hello, I’m Danny.” And the chatbot, the Oppy chatbot has written back, “Hello, how can I assist you with your real estate photography needs? I need photos, Matterport, and an aerial of a new listing. Can you, let’s see, my friend Ann referred me to you.” So the number that we’re using is 707-309-7373. So if you want to try having a conversation with the Oppy AI chatbot like I’m doing, you can do that as well. “Great to meet you, Danny. Could you please provide the address, square footage, and listing price of the property?” So the address is 391 West Paces Ferry Road, NW, Atlanta, Georgia 30305. It’s 3,500 square feet. And I will list it for $500,000. So, if you want to go check out the Oppy website, it’s: www.Oppy.Pro From there, you can either set up a free account. There’s three different tiers of service. We’ll talk a little bit about that, Alex, towards later in the show. But that is, you can actually set up a free account. And let’s see. So the Oppy writes back, “Thank you for the details, Danny. Could you also share your email and phone number for the booking?” My email address is: dan@we-get-around.com For those that actually want to email me, please use: DanSmigrod@WeGetAroundNetwork.com And my phone is: 404-964-3680 And if you actually want to call me, I would prefer that you’d call 404-303-7311, extension 1. That’s for any of our viewers. All right, so I’ve now completed the address, my email address, and my mobile phone number. I’ve indicated the square footage, what the listing price is. And Oppy writes back, “Got it, Danny. For a 3,500 square foot property, we can offer professional photos, Matterport and aerial. Would you like to proceed with scheduling?” So yes, please. So Alex, are you able to build into Oppy what pace the response comes back, whether it’s fast or slow? And if so, why would you vary that? - Yes, so I think some people don’t want people to know that it’s AI. And so they don’t want it to respond right away. That’s not really why we built it originally, but now that we’ve had it in the market, we’re realizing that is why some people want the delay. I personally believe that the faster you can respond, the better. Who cares if it’s AI, as long as it’s helpful. - Yeah, I’d agree with that. It came back and said, “Great. We have an opening on February 19th, 8 to 10 a.m. or 4 to 6 p.m. Do either of these work for you?” I’m going to say, “Yes.” I’m going to say, “8 to 10 a.m.” - And so the lag is mostly for if you want to be in the loop. So if you want to set it to 30 seconds so that if your phone or your watch or whatever buzzes, you want to hop in and then stop it from responding or at least proofread the responses before they’re actually sent out. So you have that ability and you don’t have to be worried about just not having control over it at all. - I’m going to guess when you set up Oppy for the first time, you might want to have a little pause in order to see that dialogue. I imagine after a certain amount of time, you have the confidence level that the responses which are representing you are actually
Page 9 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
good enough or better than expected and therefore enable it to respond as quick as possible. Does that sound like a plan? - Yeah. You can check out Oppy at www.Oppy.Pro www.Oppy.Pro You can set up a free account. You want to try a demo interacting with this Oppy 707-309-7373. Okay. So we see your page. And so can you set up a, so it would be a new conversation with me? - Yeah. So you’ll see over here, I could set up a new conversation. I could just go- Can I actually, can I do the conversation or do you want to show your dashboard first? - I would like to show people around. There’s a lot that you can do with this. So I just want to make sure that people are aware of the backend because having control is good. There’s a lot of times where if you’ve used ChatGPT, you know that it goes down frequently. So we built a lot of redundancy in there so that’ll keep retrying things on your behalf. And that way, you’re not stuck and not getting something unless you delete the phone number like I did. But it does a pretty good job of continuing to retry if ChatGPT is down and it’ll tell you what’s going on. And you can even tell it to notify you if a certain thing is happening or get BCC’d on certain things. You can even tell it if this person tells you their birthday or let’s say a real estate agent and they tell you if they’re buying or selling a home, save that into the notes on their file and it’ll actually go ahead and save that into their notes, which is a pretty cool feature in my opinion. - All right, you want to show us around? - Yeah. All right, so here’s your conversation and I can set the delay to be whatever I want it to be here. If I want the messages to be delayed by a certain number of minutes or completely pause. When you open it, this is the new feature that I just pushed. As soon as you open, if you tap this text field, it’ll go into auto delivery pause. And just from my experience using this, if I’m going to this page because I’m trying to find a conversation, generally it’s because I want to be there to answer the conversations if necessary.
“Whether you’re a real estate photographer; a real estate agent; a real estate broker; a plumber; an installer; a repair person; anyone that is missing out on appointments; small businesses that are missing out on money every time that they get a message that they can’t respond to; nights; weekends; holidays; while they’re in the midst of a service visit; then Oppy can be helping you make money even when you can’t pick up and interact with a potential customer directly.”
Dan Smigrod
Founder and Managing Editor We Get Around Network | WGAN-TV www.WeGetAroundNetwork.com
And so having it auto pause and then give you the ability to update it really makes a big difference in terms of how you can kind of control the conversation. - Okay, what else do you want to show us on your backend? - Yeah, so and then aside from that, we have over here the contacts. So when you create a contact, it’ll go in here and it’ll actually save their information. So here you can see it’s got the personal follow-up that it can actually generate. So imagine that you want to send a message to check in on a handful of your customers. You can go in here and just tell it to do that essentially by grabbing them all. You could say, write a very short follow-up. - Alex, let’s do this for a moment. Let’s take me back to 30,000 feet. Where do I train Oppy on my business? - Sure, yeah. So the very first page, when you create an account, you’ll be directed to this Oppy. And so it’ll pop up, it’ll create a randomly generated name and you get to pick who it is and what it’s going to do. And so you could say Remington is the name and pick a URL for it. - And you could pick any name you want. - Yeah, you could type in anything. So it could be Danny Boy. And then you give it a personality, you pick the look and feel for it and tell it what you want it to do.
Page 10 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
All those things can be done here. And then you can go down, this is where you can import your website. So this is probably the spreadsheet I imported earlier. And then here’s where you could say things like respond. - So this is kind of for anyone that uses ChatGPT, all you’re doing is creating prompts to help guide it. - Exactly. Yeah, so these are the ways you can fine-tune it and how it’s going to respond over time. And so if you want it to respond in Spanish or something like that, you can have it respond in Spanish. However you want to really give it adjustments. Or if you want to put in, like you don’t want to put in a new webpage, but you want to advertise a sale or try to promote a specific price of a product that’s temporary, something like that, you can do that here. So one-time photos. - Okay, so let’s do this. Instead of filling out all the forms, let’s just take us through. And since our viewers can set up a free account, they can play with this. So just at the top line, overview. - Yeah, sure. So then the next steps would be the scheduling. So you check it off, scheduling enabled or scheduling disabled. Then your notification. - Scheduling is when you link to your Google Calendar. - Exactly. And yeah, mine’s already linked to this account. So all you gotta do is this, but if it’s the first time, you have to connect your calendar. And then from there, you go, you can put in if you want to be BCC’d on the communications or not, and then you save it. And so you’ll see, this is the one that we were just chatting with. I think this might’ve been the link I shared with you, but you can actually embed it on your website if you want in the bottom corner, or you can just share the direct, this, the thing that I shared with you is just kind of a landing page for when we didn’t have a phone number. I always think it’s better to have a phone number because that obviously gives you the ability to actually get their phone number. So whether or not they even give you a real email, you’ll have their phone number. So that’s what you have access to. And then you can kick off a conversation from it, and you can even go to, I’ll just show you how you buy the phone number. So you come in here, just type in an area code if you want, or a phrase like pics or something, and then hop over, and you can just book the, or purchase the phone number right in here. And as soon as you do that, it just loads it onto the Oppy. So that’s what I did when I sent you this one. And if I want to get rid of this phone number, I would just click this release button here. - Okay, and then if we just go back to the dialogue that we had. - So here’s one that I was chatting about. - So that’s the human-in-the-loop feature where you can jump into the conversation even while Oppy is interacting with your potential customer. - Exactly, yeah. So this is, in my opinion, the best feature. And the most valuable page, just because you don’t feel like you’re giving up control, like I said, and you have the ability up here even to set the delay times if you want, pause the responses. And like I said, just clicking in here, it’ll set this to pause over here. So these two buttons are the ones that we added today. And these will actually give you the ability to, it just makes it easier to edit these. And I’m trending towards making this page a lot more responsive and mobile-friendly because the conversations page especially, I’m always on on my phone. - Okay. - So I want it to be super-easy to manage these conversations. - Great. One last thing to show on the backend, we’ll take you off screen share. Okay, so it’s collecting a lot of data. Is there a spreadsheet? Is there a database? What happens there with all this information you’re collecting? - Yeah, so you’ll see it runs this update and merges memory. You can see it does this get available time slots. These are things it’s doing in its head or on our computer and that the user doesn’t see. So you as Dan, when you were trying to book, you never saw that it was running to get appointments, but you see it in here. And then you’ll see the response that’s generated from that. You can even, as you just saw, you can click and it’ll populate that response straight into here if you want to build off of that or edit it and then you can just delete the message. - Yes, but I’m expecting a spreadsheet of some sort, a database to keep track. Great. - Yeah, so I kind of did this backwards, but this is the page I was on earlier. And I guess we kind of, I did it backwards, but I knew what I was doing because remember when I clicked that button up here, these are all the contacts that were saved from
Page 11 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
conversations that we’ve had. - Did you have a conversation today that we could take a look at or was there a particular record that you wanted to look at instead? - It should. So here’s Danny. And so you’ll see, I even already had it written as a follow up. Wow. Okay, this is, so I’m always surprised. I thought it was dead when you first texted it or maybe this was on the actual active phone line that you texted this, but it saved it in your notes, referred by friend Ann, interested in photos, aerial, Matterport. So it saved all of that to notes. And so- So I think what’s significant about this screen here is that there are fields like last name, phone number, email, company, website. So anything that can be extracted from that conversation that logically makes sense, if you were to import this into your other places that you happen to keep data, that it does that, but it also took the notes that I said, I was referred by Ann. And so it actually saved that in a note field. - Yes. Yep. And yeah, all of the stuff that you would actually need and then additionally notes about the person too. So, and this is where it generates a response. If you want to follow up with the person, you could schedule a message in the future. You could ... opt in and put in the person’s phone number if it’s not already in here. And then you choose which Oppy is going to send it. So ... most people will probably only have a handful of these, but let’s say they each have different purposes or represent different kinds of departments like post-sale or customer support or something like that. And you want to have them split up. You could have that once in the message. - Oh, totally get that. So just see if I can summarize there. While you may think initially you might only have one Oppy and that handles the whole thing, you might actually want to create separate personas. So just like you are in your business, you wear a hat for business development, a hat for operations, a hat for being a customer support person. And you might train each of those personas differently on how to respond. Is that kind of the gist of it? - Yes. Yeah. If you are on the appropriate plan, then multiple Oppies are included and therefore you might set them up differently for different purposes and train them differently.
“Whether you’re a real estate photographer; a real estate agent; a real estate broker; a plumber; an installer; a repair person; anyone that is missing out on appointments; small businesses that are missing out on money every time that they get a message that they can’t respond to; nights; weekends; holidays; while they’re in the midst of a service visit; then Oppy can be helping you make money even when you can’t pick up and interact with a potential customer directly.”
Dan Smigrod
Founder and Managing Editor We Get Around Network | WGAN-TV www.WeGetAroundNetwork.com
Might even have a different personality. So it might be the initial one that’s booking, might be a professional tone and then the one because, well, you know it’s that particular customer, you might say with this customer, what would be a different personality? A little sassy, for example. So you can set up a different persona for that. Check out the pricing at www.Oppy.Pro and there is a free tier so that you can get started, so you can create an account, it’s totally free, you can use a free tier of service. If you want to play with the demo account, the phone number is: 707-309-7373 Alex, before we say bye, is there anything else you wanted to cover today that I hadn’t asked you about? - I think that’s pretty much it. I’m really excited to see what people come up with with this and we’re more than happy to help out and walk people through the process if they have questions or any feedback on the product. It’s really made a difference in the short time I’ve used it and some of our customers have used it in their businesses and we’re hoping they can do the same for a lot of businesses. - I will ask you just one more question. I think when we talked about this this entire show is assuming that Oppy is specifically for real estate photographers and yet I believe it could just as easily be used for real estate agents and any service business that somebody is on the go doing appointments all day long. Is that fair to say? - Yes. Yeah, definitely.
Page 12 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
- Plumber, painter, installer. - Yeah, I need to show you my shirt. So it says chatbots are people too and it’s a variety of different people who could use it. - So I see tool belts and other things. So whether you’re a real estate photographer, a real estate agent, a real estate broker, a plumber, an installer, a repair person, anyone that is missing out on appointments, small businesses that are missing out on money every time that they get a message that they can’t respond to, nights, weekends, holidays, while they’re in the midst of a service visit, then Oppy can be helping you make money even when you can’t pick up and interact with a potential customer directly. - Yes, absolutely. And it’ll save you some gray hairs as well. - Awesome. Alex, thanks for being on the show again. - Thanks for having me, Dan. Great to see you. - Good to see you. We’ve been visiting with Alex Gustafson. Alex is the founder and CEO of Oppy based in San Clemente, California. For Alex, I’m Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum and you’ve been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.
Page 13 of 15
WGAN-TV | Intro to Oppy: 24/7 Phone & Web AI Assistant for Lead Capture, Scheduling and Follow-up | Thursday, February 15, 2024
Page 14 of 15
Watch WGAN-TV
the companion live stream show for the
We Get Around Network Forum
Scan to Watch WGAN-TV Live at 5 5 PM ET on Thursdays
Scan to Watch WGAN-TV Live at 5 On-Demand
WGAN-TV Podcast (Apple Podcasts App)
WGAN-TV Vimeo Channel
WGAN-TV Roku Channel
WGAN-TV YouTube Podcasts
WGAN-TV Android App
WGAN-TV Training U
WGAN-TV Podcast (www.WGAN-TV.com) is the official podcast of the We Get Around Network Forum. We Get Around Network Forum is the best PropTech community of professional Matterport, Realsee (and related) digital twin creators and providers shaping the future of real estate today. WGAN helps you connect the dots to succeed faster. Join us: www.WeGetAroundNetwork.com
Join the Discussion www.WeGetAroundNetwork.com Copyright 2024 | Reprinted with the permission of We Get Around Network (WGAN-TV)