“Nature is a language, can't you read? 

So ask me, ask me, ask me 

Ask me, ask me, ask me” 

– The Smiths, Ask

Regrid CEO, Jerry Paffendorf here with a fun announcement: our first ChatGPT integration is now live in The Regrid Property App for Apple and Android.

Ask ChatGPT” is a convenient new way to learn about the social, natural, economic, and historic contexts of places alongside Regrid’s comprehensive land and property information.

Simply tap the place name at the top of the map and you’ll see a box telling you what the community you’re looking at is best known for. Tap “Ask Something Else” and a gallery of 10 tappable questions will appear. Everyone can see the first answer for every community in the country, and Pro users can keep tapping until your heart’s content.

To clearly illustrate, here’s what every question and answer looks like in Marietta, Ohio (I’ll explain why I picked Marietta below):

“Ask ChatGPT” builds on the expanded place context we provide through Wikipedia and Native Lands integrations, which are also accessible in the same section of the app. I’m fond of saying “land is more than real estate,” and truly appreciate these convenient ways to learn about communities.

Look out for more integrations like this as we continue making the Regrid app the best land and property teacher as well as the best land and property data service.

Now briefly back to Marietta and some of the motivation here:

While I was donating money to friends at a recent poker night in Detroit, one of them gave me a copy of a book called The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, by David McCullough. (Clearly we get wild at poker night.)

It tells the story of Marietta, the first permanent US settlement in Ohio, founded in 1788. Some of the settlers had been authors of the Northwest Ordinance, which set the rules for what would become Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota – including prohibiting slavery in this expansion of the United States, and promising to set aside land and funding for public education.

As I read about the community clearing land, building the first houses and schools, planting crops, and identifying and protecting Native burial mounds, I found myself opening The Regrid Property App to find those properties and look at the land today.

I was able to, and it was helpful for context – ‘Hey, there’s the island parcel where sketchy former Vice President William Burr stayed with that odd family in their weird house while he was conspiring to seize a portion of Mexico before he was arrested on charges of treason; same as it ever was’ – but I wanted more than just the property boundaries, measurements, and current assessment information to bring the story of the land to life. I wanted the app to assist me in understanding more about that place.

While ChatGPT isn’t perfect, I was delighted to see it surface pointers to some of the things that I read about in the book. Properties and places are all made of stories and compelling human and natural situations, but that’s all lost until they come to life for us in some way. 

We’ve been encouraged by the results of this approach so far, and hope you enjoy our first steps into adding more educational context in The Regrid Property App. Note that we will always label any use of ChatGPT and other AI tools in our app, and provide appropriate disclaimers that they are not reviewed by humans and may be inaccurate. You’ll also find a feedback button next to every answer so you can let us know what you think of specific answers or the feature in general.

Please take “Ask ChatGPT” for a spin, try it in your own community, use it on the go, and let us know what you think!