Now there’s an App that may help you out of a parking ticket

Jul 11, 2016Uncategorized0 comments

Nobody likes getting a parking ticket, but most people don’t bother to fight it because they don’t really know where to start — or don’t have the time.

Not any more, says Joshua Browder, a 19-year-old Stanford student who whipped up a parking ticket bot in his spare time. Part chatbot, part lawyer, Browder’s anti-Robocop artificial intelligence app has successfully appealed more than $4 million in fines in less than 12 months.

New York City alone rakes in over half a billion dollars in parking ticket fines each year, making violations big business for City Hall. But from incorrectly listed license plates to obscured or missing parking signs to weather-related exceptions, there are plenty of reasons why a ticket can be erroneously issued.

Browder’s app, DoNotPay — his mom came up with the name — uses A.I. to generate automatic question-and-answer sessions with customers to locate loopholes or technicalities that could lead to a successful appeal in court.

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To date, his “robot lawyer” has overturned 160,000 parking tickets in New York City and London, said Browder. He will be launching a Seattle-based version of the app later this year, and is even in talks with Facebook to incorporate his app into Messenger, he said.

There are already a number of comparable parking ticket defenders on the market, but with different methods and varying degrees of success. DoNotPay offers a 64 percent success rate, Browder told NBC News.

San Francisco-based Fixed, launched in 2013, uses actual lawyers to review each claim. In addition, the app taps into Google Street View to assert whether a sign was obscured, or a yellow line had faded, for example. WinIt, a popular app in New York City, processes around 200 tickets a day, say its founders. To date the app has successfully appealed around 30 percent of parking violations.

Browder has received a lot of positive feedback for his lawyer bot. “Thanks for saving us all $/time/sanity!” tweeted one fan (who happens to be an FCC commissioner).

“A lawyer working for free? Definitely a malfunction in it somewhere,” wrote one skeptical commenter.

Another had a different project in mind for such efficient legal bots.

“We need to get them on to Brexit then. And quick.”

By Lucy Bayly for nbcnews.com

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