Chatbots have been around since the days of AOL Chat, but at no other time have the been in the headlines as much as they are now. Quite often the news isn’t all that positive, so it’s always refreshing to see young programmers creating bots for the benefit of their fellow man.
A chatbot called DoNotPay, the “world’s first robot lawyer” has successfully contested 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York …for free! The online-robot appealed over $4 million in parking fees. The bot helps users contest parking tickets in an easy to use chat-like interface.
The bot was programmed by a second year-student at Stanford University, Joshua Browder, who created DoNotPay after receiving 30 parking tickets of his own. AI is perfectly suited to the formulaic task of appealing parking fines, and the best news, it is able to find appropriate legal advice without charging lawyers fees!
It always brightens my day to receive these emails. I wish the local governments would just follow the rules pic.twitter.com/1gz6NjYSs3
— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) June 26, 2016
DoNotPay successfully resolved 160,000 tickets out of a total of 250,000 cases it has taken on in the past 21 months. The creator would like to expand DoNotPay to Seattle and later take on issues such as helping refugees navigate foreign legal systems and aiding people who are HIV positive in understand their rights.
Featured image source: [theodysseyonline]