EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Guillaume Desombre, CEO at LabSense

January 19, 2020
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The 27th Property Portal Watch Conference was held in Madrid this past November; it was our largest event thus far, with 400+ C-Level leaders attending from 40 different countries around the world, among them, Guillaume Desombre, CEO at LabSense, who was kind enough to sit down for an interview with us.

French-based LabSense is a company that automates content production at a grand scale, uses artificial intelligence, enhances content and promises to save thousands of hours of copywriting and improve conversion rates for its customers. 

"We work with a lot of media on many topics; basically we do all the content which is very massive with a lot of data. Despite what some may think, we are not trying to eliminate people, we are freeing time for them," stated Desombre.

We asked Desombre if his company would be considered a disruptor, "In a way yes. We are really changing how people engage with and see content production, so basically, we are a gamechanger in that field and we can produce tens of thousands of content very quickly very effectively and optimized for SEO which is something extremely important for a lot of our clients."

Desombre elaborated on the accuracy of the service, "It's like most artificial intelligence, behind it there is work of linguists. So, we have a linguistic team from a number of different countries. We can work in 12 languages, i.e.: English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese, etc. 

"Basically it is the work of a data scientist and linguistics and developers. Each one of these teams is not good at doing other things. For example, linguists or journalists are not good at manipulating data, ad coders are not good at writing, so basically all those are in place and enable production at scale."

"Once it's launched we have a sort of setup stage, after which it runs and flows without human supervision because there is too much content produced that it would not be humanly possible to supervise it all. For example, when we have generated weather forecasts or we have written sports articles, the media that we work for, they have published them online without any supervision and they have worked out great.

"We are very factual. We are the contrary of 'fake news' we only produce editorialized data, so we ensure that data speaks for itself."

Desombre says that the articles can be any length, from a snippet to a multi-page report, "Depending on the data, we can write a five-page article about a football game because there is so much data on it, but that would not be very relevant because people would not read five pages of a sports article. 

"We mostly focus on short content, but we did a 25-page report for the European Commission, so we can also automate really important content. Most of the time we work on 300 to 500 words text which is a standard format, and for listings, we are able to manage short, medium or long listings depending on the content."

Would a listing consist of text such as "3br, 2 ba home for sale" or the like? "No, a property listing would be something like 'Beautiful home close to parks and school XYZ, as well as metro line 123'. We would use all the data as well as all the open data available about the house, and then we would write a text. We can also introduce marketing aspects into the text(s) with more 'feelings' depending on the characteristics of the property."

Desombre said that his company's service can be used to produce content for marketing purposes, such as posts for social media or news feeds, as well as retailers, "We also provide content with product description on thousands of products, or for travel portals where we write about destinations, hotels, etc. 

"We have many clients who say that they prefer to have AI producing the content rather than their salespeople because writing is not their strength and they don't have the time to do so. Or in some cases, like in France, on The Riviera, you need to produce text not only in French but in other languages as well, like English or Russian, and there simply are not enough resources for this.

"The key is to save time, all the while ensuring quality. It's not magic per se, but once it's automated it does seem like magic."

Over 220 attendees are expected at our next event - the Asian Property Portal Watch Conference in Thailand. The Conference will be held in Bangkok from 26th to 27th February 2020, and it will run for two days, featuring expert Industry Speakers, Innovative Companies at the forefront of the online real estate industry. The Asian Property Portal Watch Conference also offers amazing Social Events, a perfect opportunity for networking.
We hope to see you there.

Join us February 26-27 for the Property Portal Watch Conference Bangkok 2020.

Property Portal Watch Bangkok Conference 2020, Feb 26-27

 

January 19, 2020

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