This chatbot fought parking fines and now it's helping refugees

Refugees can now use a Facebook chatbot to apply for asylum in the US, Canada, and the UK -- helping them navigate unfamiliar legal systems and avoid exorbitant lawyers' fees. It's an update to DoNotPay -- a Facebook chatbot that assisted 250,000 people in challenging parking fines, and has since been expanded into multiple other sectors, from claiming compensation for delayed flights to providing HIV legal advice. "Ultimately, I just want to level the playing field so there's a bot for everything," Joshua Browder, the Stanford student who created DoNotPay, told Business Insider. DoNotPay is a chatbot built in Facebook's messenger interface. It talks to the user and asks them questions, just like a real person, and records their responses. "There's this huge problem among immigration lawyers where the majority of their time is spent filling out forms rather than actually challenging the legal complexities of the case," Browder, whose grandmother fled the Holocaust, said in a phone call from California.