High-tech approach to listings

A company is embracing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help dealers improve their online vehicle listings.

DriveText is the brainchild of Ange Humble, who spent 10 years working at Trade Me – as an account manager and then sales manager – before launching her new venture.

She spotted an opportunity to create the product after regularly dealing with requests from dealers about how to write better marketing descriptions for cars they were trying to sell.

“Some dealers might have lots of similar vehicles and it can be hard for them to write something new and interesting about 30 different Aquas, for example,” explains Humble.

“Then after Covid hit people were increasingly looking online when thinking of buying a vehicle, rather than going to a yard and looking at cars, so having adverts with a good description became even more important.

“I spent time teaching people to write really good listings. After a while, I realised I’d repeated the same story a number of times and knew this was a big problem for dealerships who spend a lot of money on advertising.”

Humble, pictured, left Trade Me in 2021 and has been working on DriveText since. She says she looked into the possibility of AI addressing the challenge of compiling unique vehicle listings and “realised there was a solution”.

“We started with a basic product and asked dealerships to send us basic details of cars such as make, model, year and realised the dealerships collect and store very little or minimal information on each vehicle,” she explains.

DriveText uses various authorised external sources to gather data on every vehicle it provides descriptions for. It then plugs into AutoPlay and Motorcentral (or other vehicle management system) to source the clients’ vehicles details. From there, its AI system generates a detailed description that is “humanised” and approved by DriveText, and is also search engine optimisation (SEO) friendly.

She says the latest version of DriveText produces listings that concentrate on four key areas: convenience, transmission, technology and safety.

It also offers three different tones of voice. They are composed, which is serious and professional; charged, which is quirky and involves more play on words and exclamation marks; and popular, which offers something in the middle of the two other options.

These were developed following feedback from a variety of dealerships, ranging from big franchises to small used dealers, with some requesting a more serious tone to listings and others wanting to inject some more fun.

Humble says each listing is different and using DriveText allows dealership sales staff to devote more time to selling and following leads rather than writing adverts.

“There was nothing like this in the market and we knew there was a definite appetite for it in New Zealand and in the UK, where we have now opened an office as well,” she adds.

“We’ve got some big plans and new products in the pipeline. We want to use AI as a tool for the future because what it can do is changing so rapidly.”