We have all been there, you rush out of the shops confident you will not have a parking ticket. After all you are leaving 10 minutes before your meter expires. As you walk up to your car you spy a little white rectangle of paper fixed to your windscreen.
Sound familiar? Never fear the DoNotPay chatbot is here and has overturned parking tickets worth over $4 million in New York and London.
The chatbot Lawyer was invented by Joshua Browder, a second-year Stanford University student who received over 30 parking tickets around London in just a few months. He saw there was no simple online process to explore options to dispute parking fines, so he spent his summer working to create one.
According to The Guardian, in the 21 months since the free service was launched in London and now New York, Browder says DoNotPay has taken on 250,000 cases and won 160,000, giving it a success rate of 64% appealing over $4m of parking tickets.
The current version of the chatbot Lawyer can help people receive compensation for airline flight delays longer than 4 hours, negotiate payments for speeding fines and appeal parking fines. And while getting out of parking fines is great, Browder has plans for taking on bigger social justice causes such as helping HIV-positive individuals understand their rights, as well as become a guide for asylum seekers.
The chatbot is a very simple form of artificial intelligence and as the platform develops it will be interesting to see how this type of assistance can change the lives of people with limited access to legal representation.
