DoNotPay's Latest AI Tool Is a Bill-negotiating Chatbot

DoNotPay, the firm that touts itself as "the world's first robot lawyer," is releasing a new chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to help users negotiate payments and cancel subscriptions without getting in touch with customer care.

Effectiveness

CEO Joshua Browder demonstrated the program online, and it was successful in getting a reduction on an internet bill using Xfinity's live chat with Comcast.

The bot then used the consumer's account information to negotiate a lower fee with the customer support contact.

After the chatbot complained about Xfinity's service and threatened legal action, the agent offered to discount the customer's internet account by $10 per month.

As per the report by The Verge, the DoNotPay bot sounds quite human during the whole conversation with Xfinity, except for one little glitch where the tool states "[insert email address]" instead of the customer's real email.

Browder pointed out that in this case, the AI exaggerated the internet disruptions, similar to how a consumer would, but that this will not be the issue when the chatbot is made accessible to everyone.

According to Browder, "We won't allow for exaggeration of facts in the final version. But it will still be aggressive, citing laws and having an emotional appeal."

Experimental

This feature expands on the already impressive array of services provided by DoNotPay, the most prominent of which is the ability for customers to create and submit templates to different entities to simplify the process of resolving complaints, canceling subscriptions, disputing parking tickets, and so on.

It also utilizes machine learning to help clients hide their photographs from face recognition searches and emphasize the most relevant elements of the terms of service agreement.

Nevertheless, this is the first instance that DoNotPay has ever used an AI chatbot to have a live conversation with a human agent.

In an interview with The Verge, Browder explained that they have mainly been utilizing rules-based systems, templates, for the last five years.

"We've trained this AI to be like a robot lawyer for consumers, and I imagine that the disputes that we can handle have now gone up significantly because we can handle cases where you can respond rather than just sending one template."

Downside

The GPT-3 API used by OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot-which many people have been experimenting with to create in-depth responses-forms the foundation of DoNotPay's bot.

However, Browder sees the limited functionality of the DoNotPay tool as an opportunity to broaden the range of problems it may solve, such as communicating with a customer service agent to cancel a subscription or negotiating a credit report.

Browder claims that the chatbot will not start inventing things if it cannot answer a query. When it's uncertain, it will merely halt in its tracks and seek out the user for guidance.

So that customers do not have to check in on the tool constantly, development is underway on a system to send out notifications whenever this occurs.

Browder told The Verge that in the future, people would be able to write back answers to the AI's inquiries so that it can carry on a conversation.

Browder claims the tool is compatible with every US company and says it will be available for testing in the next two weeks.