The DoNotPay robot lawyer generates documents US consumers can take to the small claims court.
Depending on the state, consumers can sue Equifax for up to $25,000 (£19,000).

The Equifax data breach has affected 143 million US customers.

Despite repeated requests by the BBC, Equifax has not confirmed exactly how many UK consumers were affected, but reports suggest the details of up to 44 million British people may have been compromised.

The firm has committed to working with regulators in the US, UK and Canada on next steps. It is also offering free credit monitoring and identity theft protection for a year.

“We pride ourselves on being a leader in managing and protecting data, and we are conducting a thorough review of our overall security operations,” said Richard Smith, Equifax chairman and chief executive, when the breach was revealed.

Parking tickets appeals
DoNotPay was invented by British teenager Joshua Browder, who is an undergraduate at Stanford University.

The free service was originally designed to help appeal against parking or speeding tickets by selecting the right letter that corresponds to the user’s issue.

This is not the first time it has been programmed for altruistic purposes – in March, Mr Browder adapted the bot to help asylum seekers with immigration applications and to obtain financial support.

As of July, he estimated that the bot had helped to defeat 375,000 parking tickets in two years.

Unauthorised access
At the end of July, Equifax discovered signs of unauthorised access to data including names, addresses and social security numbers.

The credit report giant set up a website where consumers can check whether their information was accessed and sign up for free credit and identity theft monitoring.

The data breach is one of the biggest ever reported in the US and victims are at risk of identity theft and fraud.

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Source: BBC

The post Chatbot offers legal help to Equifax data breach victims appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

Yet despite the promise of a revolution in how we interact with services and companies online, progress has been utterly miserable – the vast majority of chat bots are gimmicky, pointless or just flat out broken.

But this week I was given great cause for optimism, in the form of Alec Jones, a 14-year-old from Victoria, Canada.

For the past six months, Alec been working on Christopher Bot, a chatbot that helps students keep track of homework they’ve been given over the course of a week.

To set things up, a student shares his or her schedule with Christopher Bot, and from then on it will send a quick message at the end of each lesson asking if any homework had been set.

“Do you have homework for maths?” it asked 30-year-old me pretending to be a child for the sake of this piece.

“Yes!” I replied.

“Your teacher needs to chill out on the homework,” came the auto-response, adding, “what homework do you have?”

“Algebra :-(”

“Ok, got it.”

Through this interface, I’m able easily insert “algebra” – urgh – into a weekly schedule that I can then refer back to at any point to see what I need to get done.

Once I complete a piece of homework, I tell Christopher Bot, and it congratulates me, automatically removing the homework from my list of things to do. The best bit? The bot keeps quiet during the holidays.

Chat bot promise

What makes me so impressed by this is that, of all the experiments I’ve seen so far, it is the first time a chatbot has genuinely been the best way to tackle a problem.

Other chat bots are a lesser experience of something else. The CNN news chatbot, for example, is worse at giving you the news than any of CNN’s other products.

And popular weather bot Poncho, while cute and well-branded, has a habit of telling me it’s about to rain five minutes after water started falling on my head.

But Christopher Bot shows the potential for producing a service that is completely at home within chat – removing the need for students to access some extra tool to keep track of what needs doing, and interacting in a way that (slightly) lessens the unavoidable chore of homework.

“I wanted it to not just sound like a robot,” Alec told me.

“I wanted it to sound kind of like my friends would. If you get homework, everyone always just shakes their heads and says ‘that sucks’.”

And it does this within an app his friends are already likely using (though perhaps Snapchat would be a more useful place for it, one day).

In short, it’s a product those companies banking on chatbots being a winner should seek to emulate.

Allo allo

It’s extremely difficult, for now, to measure the success of chatbots. Ad industry magazine AdAge noted that: “Bot analytics and bot-building software companies all have shortcomings, largely because this technology is in its infancy.

“Few benchmarks exist, especially when trying to compare data across platforms.”

So without data, we can’t say what’s working just yet – though there are some clues to what isn’t.

Google’s AI-powered messaging app Allo, since being launched to much fanfare last year, has failed to make even a minor dent in a messaging app market dominated by Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger.

And that’s because there’s no compelling reason to bother with Allo. None of its features – like asking it for directions – provide enough of a benefit beyond what you’d get from just tapping in your request the “old fashioned” way. Users have an incredibly short fuse for chat bots not working exactly as we expect.

Most big companies are missing the point, Alec told me. “There are a lot of chat bots made by these big companies that are supposed to help you interact with their service more and give you more functionality,” he said.

“But it feels like they just saw this new platform, bots, and thought ‘oh that’s cool, people are looking at these now, let’s build a bot’.

“It feels like they’ve just made a compromised version of what they’re actually trying to build.”

Usefulness

Earlier this week, Alec’s bot was shared on Product Hunt, a website I profiled recently, where it gained rave reviews and a fair share of feature requests.

“You’re solving a problem many students have,” read one reply.

“Fellow 14 year old here,” began another. “Great job man! That’s sick that you’re my age and made such a cool and useful product. Awesome!”

Like any good developer, Alec has aspirations to build on the what he’s made – he wants to make it work for people in the working world, too.

But first he feels Facebook and others must do more to prove the usefuless of chatbots to people.

“I think that the real problem is that not enough people on Facebook who aren’t ‘techies’ don’t know what a bot is, and then they don’t use it. More people need to know what a bot is,” he said.

When Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage in front of his developers last year, he said he was opening up Messenger so that anybody could make great apps. I bet he didn’t think it would be a 14-year-old who would show him how it’s done.

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Source: BBC

The post The boy behind Facebook’s best chatbot appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.