‘Legal chatbot helped reverse 160,000 parking fines’

A 19-year-old developer’s DoNotPay chatbot is said to have helped successfully challenge 160,000 of 250,000 parking tickets in London since fall last year. At least that’s what the developer claims. The chatbot has recently become available to people from New York.

Joshua Browder made his chatbot DoNotPay because he disagrees with parking fines. “I think people who get parking tickets are vulnerable. They’re not out to break the law. I think they’re being misused as a source of revenue by local governments,” he told Venture Beat.

The chatbot asks users about the circumstances and based on that generates a letter that users can use to challenge fines. The bot works not only for parking tickets, but also for other refunds, such as for delays and for basic legal questions.

Browder has now also made DoNotPay available to New Yorkers, who would have used it nine thousand times by now. The next city where the chatbot should be introduced is Seattle.

The developer is also working on bots that provide legal assistance to people with HIV and asylum seekers. The latter uses IBM Watson for the translation from Arabic to English.