How a ‘robot’ is offering legal advice to refugees

You’re probably thinking oh no not another robot story! Well as many seem to think they will become more prominent within human society in years to come virtually performing tasks which today we as humans cannot comprehend a robot performing, we thought we might enlighten you on this story we came across where a robot is able to assist some of the most vulnerable in today’s society. Not all robots are bad and not all robots are here to steal human jobs as some may argue.

This robot developed by Joshua Browder a 20 year old British student currently studying at Stanford University in the US is not necessarily helping refugees through translation services although Browder intends to expand his chatbot from its current functionality through Facebook messenger into more applications like whatsapp and also other languages. For the not so tech savvy readers a chatbot is a computer programme which conversates via audio and text methods. The aim of such programmes is to allow for a human like conversation to take place between actual humans and technology.

Joshua Browder initially created his chatbot DoNotPay to help people challenge parking and speeding tickets having been frustrated with the amount of parking tickets he received since passing his driving test. With over 160,000 successful appeals he expanded his chatbot to help people in need of emergency housing and has now gone on to enable the chatbot to assist refugees and asylum seekers needing help on their immigration applications and funding. Browder’s app was created with the help of lawyers across the UK, USA and Canada and can now help refugees in each of these countries for example assisting UK asylum seekers with applying for financial support.

With many refugees coming in from regions such as the Middle East it may be a challenge for them to effectively use such software as presently the chatbot works in English and is not yet able to offer an Arabic translation service. In the US with many migrants from South America a need for Spanish translation services is valuable and this is something that the chatbot could add on in order to help a wider audience.

It goes without saying that technology is advancing at a fast pace but with inventions like Joshua Browder’s many people will be able to access the help they need much more easily.

What are your thoughts on this? We would like to hear your opinions.

Image: Screenshot, donotpay.co.uk