DoNotPay, the company that touts itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer,” is launching a new AI-powered chatbot that can help you negotiate bills and cancel subscriptions without dealing with customer service.
In a demo of the tool posted by Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay, the chatbot manages to get a discount on a Comcast internet bill via Xfinity’s live chat. Once connected to a customer service representative, the bot will request a better rate using the account information provided by the customer. The chatbot mentions problems with Xfinity’s services and threatens legal action, to which the representative responds by offering to take $10 off the customer’s monthly internet bill.
This tool builds on the many useful services that DoNotPay already offers, mainly enabling customers to generate templates and submit them to various entities, enabling them to file complaints, cancel subscriptions, challenge parking fines and much more. It even uses machine learning to highlight key parts of a service agreement and helps customers protect their photos from facial recognition searches. But this is the first time DoNotPay uses an AI chatbot to interact with a representative in real time.
“For the past five years, we’ve mostly used rule-based systems, and by that I mean templates,” Browder said in an interview with The edge. “We trained this AI to be like a robot lawyer for consumers, and I imagine the disputes we can handle have increased significantly now because we can handle cases where you can respond instead of just sending one template.”
DoNotPay’s bot provides convincingly human-like answers throughout the interaction with Xfinity, save for a hiccup where the tool says: “[insert email address]instead of specifying the customer’s actual email. Brewer tells The edge that DoNotPay will clean up some of its responses before it goes live – and make the bot sound less polite, as it’s pretty heavy on the “thank you”.
In this particular example, Browder notes that the AI ”exaggerated the internet outage, similar to how a customer would,” but that this isn’t something the chatbot will do once it’s available to all users. “We don’t allow exaggeration of facts in the final version,” says Browder. “But it will still be aggressive, law-making, and emotionally appealing,” which is (unfortunately) more than I can say for myself when talking to a customer service representative.
DoNotPay’s bot is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 API, the underlying toolset used by OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot that countless people have played with to generate detailed (and sometimes nonsensical) responses. However, DoNotPay’s tool was created for a specific purpose, and Browder seems to see it as an opportunity to expand the range of tasks it can perform, such as chatting with a representative to cancel a customer’s subscription or negotiating a contract. credit report.
If the chatbot doesn’t know the answer to a question, Browder says it won’t make things up. “It just stops and asks the user for help” if unsure, explains Browder. The company is working on ways to alert users when this happens so they don’t have to sit at their computers and keep an eye on the tool. Brewer tells The edge that users will eventually be able to respond to the AI’s questions via SMS, allowing it to continue its “conversation.”
The tool is open for testing over the next two weeks, and Browder says it will work with all companies in the US.
