This chat bot has overturned 160,000 parking tickets in under two years - for free

There are few moments in life as galling as seeing a parking ticket slapped onto your car windscreen but there may be hope in the form of a chat bot that has already helped to overturn 160,000 tickets in London and New York in just under two years. The DoNotPay artificial intelligence service, created by a 19-year-old student, is called the "world's first robot lawyer" and uses a step-by-step chat-like system that asks a series of questions to find out the details of the issued ticket and then highlight areas where you can appeal the fine. Since it went live in just under two years it has taken on 250,000 cases and managed to overturn 160,000 of them – giving it a respectable 64% success rate and saving ticketed road users a total of 2.9m. Its creator, London-born Stanford University student Joshua Browder, was inspired to develop DoNotPay after he received 30 parking tickets in London and decided to study all the legal grounds to fight fines. He revealed that he accessed thousands of documents from the Freedom of Information Act and found that appealing a parking ticket was a rather systematic, by-the-numbers process.