Chatbot Beats Parking Tickets

A free chatbot has reportedly helped 160,000 people overturn parking tickets. The man behind DoNotPay now plans to create similar services for other legal complaints.

Joshua Browder, a student at Stanford University, created the bot to help inform people of their rights when challenging parking tickets. While it appears to the user as if it were a live chat with an expert, it’s effectively just a flowchart of questions about the circumstances behind the parking ticket and then a set of instructions for how to launch an appeal.

The service currently covers the UK and New York. Browser says it works well because the appeals process for parking in these cities — in comparison to many areas of law at least — is relatively objective and based on fixed rules.

According to Browder, the service has led to successful appeals in 160,000 of the 250,000 cases it has taken on. It’s not entirely clear if the remaining 90,000 cases actually led to unsuccessful appeals, or if the bot informed the user that their circumstances meant an appeal would fail.

Browder is now working on adapting the technology for several other situations including claiming compensation for delayed flights, checking your rights if you are HIV positive, and dealing with legal systems as a refugee.

He’s also planning to make the technology available so that legal experts could create their own bots without having to learn coding.