Last summer, a British teen created a website that helped poor Brits appeal their unfair parking tickets. Now, 19-year-old Joshua Browder is back helping those in need of legal advice through a new robot upgrade to his site, DoNotPay, that can answer queries on parking ticket fines, claims for delayed flights and trains, and even general legal questions.
According to Browder, who is currently studying Economics and Computer Science at Stanford University, he came up with the Robot Lawyer after emails asking for advice started to come in the thousands.
At first, although he tried to keep up with all the emails asking him for help, it became clear that he would not be able to answer all the questions that were sent to him.
His solution was to make a robot that could automatically and intelligently answer all those questions for him in real time and online. He also wanted the robot to sound as human as possible so the users won't get generic or even unrelated responses.
Browder said that he was able to program his robot to compare phrases on its own using keywords, word order, and pronouns. This helped him eliminate the problem of the robot not understanding the same question when it is phrased differently by different people. This way, the robot actually improves on its responses as more people ask it questions.
Most users usually ask the robot questions related to parking tickets and what kind of appeal they should file in court. The robot generates its answers with a legal advice from Browder's own research and from the Freedom of Information database.
This is not a "set it and forget it" project for Browder. He gets notified whenever the robot encounters a question that it cannot understand or doesn't have the answer to. In this case, Browder personally looks for the ways to supply the appropriate answer.
"On the backend, whenever the robot can't answer, I get notified and I work as quickly as possible to add functionality for any future requests of a similar nature,” he said.
Although the robot can't replace a human to legally represent you in an actual court hearing just yet. The DoNotPay website claims it can generate a winning appeal for a parking ticket within 30 seconds. It is also is available as an Android app.
Photo: Chris Isherwood | Flickr
