Cutting You a Better Deal

The human arsenal has always been on the loaded side, and yet it has never possessed anything more valuable than that tendency of ours to grow on a consistent basis. This is largely because the stated tendency has allowed us to hit upon some huge milestones, with technology appearing as a major member of the stated group. Talk about why technology enjoys such an esteemed stature among people, the answer will touch upon its skill-set before it covers anything else. Nevertheless, if we look a little bit closer, it should become clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired by the way we applied those across a real-world environment. The latter component was, in fact, what gave the creation a spectrum-wide presence, and consequentially, kickstarted a tech revolution. This revolution, in turn, will go on to scale up the human experience from every conceivable direction, but even after achieving something so monumental, technology will somehow continue to bring all the right goods to the table. The same has grown to become a lot more evident in recent times, and truth be told, a new development around the fintech space should only make that trend bigger and better moving forward.

DoNotPay, the company that bills itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer,” has officially launched a new AI-powered chatbot, which is designed to help you in negotiating bills and cancelling unnecessary subscriptions without having to deal with customer service. According to certain reports, the chatbot is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 API, the underlying toolset used by OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot that is generally used for the purpose of generating detailed automated responses. So, how will the technology contribute towards the stated cause? Well, looking at a demo posted by the company, the bot starts out by connecting with an Xfinity’s customer service representative. Once it does so, the next step would be to ask for a better rate on the customer’s behalf. In order to expedite negotiations and get that much-needed edge, the bot is even able to point out all the shortcomings of Xfinity’s services. Hold on, there is more. This chatbot, as a way of backing up its claims regarding the service, also displayed a knowhow to threaten legal action on one occasion, thus prompting the representative to offer a $10 discount on the customer’s monthly internet bill.

Of course, it’s not the first time DoNotPay has tried to solve customer disputes in an innovative manner. The company already offers various different tools to file consumer complaints, cancel subscriptions, fight parking tickets, and do a whole lot more within a similar niche. Beyond that, DoNotPay also has the setup to use machine learning for highlighting important bits in terms of service agreement, as well as for shielding customers’ personal picture from those uncalled facial recognition searches. Nevertheless, with the new AI chatbot, the company has now ventured into a territory that it has never explored before.

“For the past five years, we’ve mainly been using rules-based systems, and what I mean by that is templates,” said Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay. “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.”

Having witnessed a practical demo, DoNotPay is currently planning to make some adjustments around the technology. For instance, during the drill, the bot showed a tendency to exaggerate internet outages, something that is not envisioned to be a part of it moving forward.

“We won’t allow for exaggeration of facts in the final version,” said Browder. “But it will still be aggressive, citing laws and having an emotional appeal,” which is (sadly) more than I can say for myself whenever I chat with a customer service representative.”

Another thing worth mentioning here is how the bot won’t just start making things up, if it doesn’t know the answer to a question. Instead, it will consult the user, who enlisted the bot to lead the relevant negotiations. However, the user won’t be required to keep a constant eye on the proceedings, as they will be able to respond to the bot’s query through a simple text.

The chatbot is slated to enter an extensive testing phase in the next two weeks.