Free AI Chatbot Goes to Bat for Beleaguered Consumers

Author: Richard Adhikari / Source: E-Commerce Times

DoNotPay, an AI-based chatbot app created to help fight parking tickets in the UK, now addresses roughly 1,000 consumer concerns and is available throughout the United States as well as across the pond. The app’s creator, Stanford University student Joshua Browder, announced the expansion last week.

Powered by IBM Watson, DoNotPay has about 1,000 bots capable of tackling a variety of legal and service issues, ranging from fighting one’s landlord to appealing against unreasonable warranties, to getting a refund when a company doesn’t fulfill its promise.

The app lets users use a feature similar to instant messaging to get help.

When opened, the app presents a blue screen that asks what it can help the user with, and offers a search field in which the user can type a response.

It then triggers a series of options. The user selects the appropriate one, and a bot fills in PDFs or generates letters based on the information entered by the user.

DoNotPay also offers an extra help option. Clicking on it triggers a blank email addressed to DoNotPay support in the UK. Users supply their own details and are promised a response within 24 hours.

The app apparently can connect users to outside help, such as selected agencies, as well.

“Though DoNotPay focuses specifically on guiding consumers through commonplace but complex legal forms and issues, it’s easy to see how the company’s approach to using a bot-enabled infrastructure might be applicable in related circumstances,” observed Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

“Pursuing small-time fraudsters and broken device contracts are areas where the complexity of the process subtracts substantially from the potential benefits,” he…

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