Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
DoNotPay, the company that bills itself as âthe worldâs first robot lawyer,â is launching a new AI-powered chatbot that can help you negotiate bills and cancel subscriptions without having to deal with customer service.
In a demo of the tool posted by DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder, the chatbot manages to get a discount on a Comcast internet bill through Xfinityâs live chat. Once it connects with a customer service representative, the bot asks for a better rate using account details provided by the customer. The chatbot cites problems with Xfinityâs services and threatens to take legal action, to which the representative responds by offering to take $10 off the customerâs monthly internet bill.
Here it is! The first ever Comcast bill negotiated 100% with A.I and LLMs.
Our @DoNotPay ChatGPT bot talks to Comcast Chat to save one of our engineers $120 a year on their Internet bill.
Will be publicly available soon and work on online forms, chat and email. pic.twitter.com/eehdQ5OXrl
â Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) December 12, 2022
This tool builds upon the many neat services DoNotPay already offers, which mainly allows customers can generate and submit templates to various entities, helping them to file complaints, cancel subscriptions, fight parking tickets, and much more. It even uses machine learning to highlight the most important parts of a terms of service agreement and helps customers shield their photos from facial recognition searches. But this is the first time DoNotPayâs using an AI chatbot to interact with a representative in real time.
âFor the past five years, weâve mainly been using rules-based systems, and what I mean by that is templates,â Browder says in an interview with The Verge. âWeâve 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.â
DoNotPayâs bot issues convincingly human-like answers throughout the entire interaction with Xfinity, save for a hiccup where the tool says â[insert email address]â instead of providing the customerâs actual email. Browder tells The Verge that DoNotPay will clean up some of its responses before it goes live â and make the bot sound less polite, as itâs pretty heavy on the âthank-yous.â
In this particular example, Browder notes that the AI âexaggerated the Internet outages, similar to how a customer would,â but that this isnât something the chatbot will do once it becomes available to all users. âWe wonât allow for exaggeration of facts in the final version,â Browder says. âBut it will still be aggressive, citing laws and having an emotional appeal,â which is (sadly) more than I can say for myself whenever I chat with a customer service representative.
DoNotPayâs bot is built on top of OpenAIâs GPT-3 API, the underlying toolset used by OpenAIâs ChatGPT chatbot that tons of people have been playing around with to generate detailed (and sometimes nonsensical) responses. DoNotPayâs tool is made for a specific purpose, though, and Browder seems to view it as an opportunity to expand the number of tasks it can tackle, like chatting with a representative to cancel a customerâs subscription or negotiating a credit report.
If the chatbot doesnât know an answer to a particular question, Browder says it wonât start making things up. âIt will just stop in its tracks and ask the user for helpâ when itâs unsure, Browder explains. The companyâs working on ways to alert users whenever this happens so that they donât have to sit in front of their computer and monitor the tool. Browder tells The Verge that users could eventually respond to the AIâs questions over text message so that it can continue its âconversation.â
The tool will be open for testing in the next two weeks, and Browder says it will work with all companies in the US.