A 19-year old's bot has overturned 160,000 parking tickets and saved millions in fines

A 19-year old lad from UK has created a bot that’s succeeded in overturning over 160,000 parking tickets and effectively saving British motorists from $4 million in fines. The bot, called DoNotPay, asks questions about the parking ticket, such as where the incident happened and whether parking signs were prominently visible. The bot will then walk you through the appeals process, automating a task that would normally require a lot of running around and a lawyer. DoNotPay will also help you file compensation claims for delayed and canceled flights. So far, the bot has managed to overturn 160,000 parking tickets with a success rate of around 64 percent.  

So focused on keeping DoNotPay from crashing that I just got my own parking ticket pic.twitter.com/JXsZkeTbFj

— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) June 28, 2016

The bot’s creator, Joshua Browder, was born and brought up in London, and as Fortune points out, he’s had a bit of a rich past. At 13, he reportedly built an app for Pret a Manger, a British sandwich chain. The app wasn’t commissioned by the company and a direct violation of their copyright, but it was so successful that it was later adopted as the official app. Browder went on to study at Stanford and was already experimenting with bots by the time he joined. A course in machine-learning apparently put him on the right path and as a direct result of that, DoNotPay was born. VentureBeat reports that Browder is also working on a bot that will help people with HIV “understand their legal rights. He’s also creating a bot to help refugees seek asylum using IBM Watson to translate Arabic to English. VentureBeat also quotes Browder as expressing his disappointment in the current state of bots. “I feel like there’s a gold mine of opportunities because so many services and information could be automated using AI, and bots are a perfect way to do that, and it’s disappointing at the moment that it’s mainly used for commerce transactions by ordering flowers and pizzas,” he tells them. DoNotPay has now made its way to New York and is expected to hit soon hit other American cities.