You know how, when you need customer service, the lack of phone lines and physical offices means you’re funneled toward using a chatbot? Well, how about using your own chatbot to chat back and even up the score? That’s the promise of the new GPTChat-based bot from the defender of the masses, DoNotPay, which can negotiate bills and save you a ton of money. “Chatbots don’t get angry, and they don’t get frustrated. This is a useful quality in cases where you might encounter long wait times and less-than-helpful staff,” Ben Michael, attorney at Michael and Associates, told Lifewire via email.
DoNotPay
We have previously seen DoNotPay generating disposable credit card numbers for you on the web and also helping you through the paperwork to dispute parking tickets. Now it has harnessed the power of the Chat GPT chatbot to duel with corporate chatbots in your place. In this demo video, you see the chatbot negotiating with Comcast and saving the engineer (who did the testing on their own account, apparently) saving $120 on their internet bill. And it’s not just ISPs it can do battle with. “Our implementation is not specific to Comcast. Will work for every company in the United States on form, chat, and email,” DoNot Pay founder Joshua Browder said on Twitter. Browder says that the tool uses the more sophisticated OpenAI GPT-3 API, along with custom data models
Chat Roulette
I actually prefer chatbots to phone calls for many tasks. Recently I had to get a computer repaired for a friend. The computer was still under warranty, and the vendor’s chatbot (or perhaps real chat person) made it easy. One simultaneous advantage and disadvantage of chatbots is that they do what they are programmed to do. This can mean you can’t get the answers or solutions you need, but it also means that, unlike real people, they won’t get annoyed and cut you off or make up a false answer to get you off the line. From the company’s point of view, chatbots are a good way to deal with routine inquiries, freeing up live agents for more complex tasks. But chatbots can still be a pain to use, and Bowder’s tool is a fantastic idea. A trained chatbot can also be loaded with data about the plans, prices, and more of various vendors, which is knowledge we will probably never have. This could give it an edge in negotiations. Interestingly, the video shows a change in billing, which makes one wonder whether the bot is legally qualified to engage on your behalf. However, the lawyer we asked seemed more concerned with the bots doing a good job. “If it’s something low stakes like getting a discount on a subscription, I’d be comfortable throwing a chatbot at the situation, but I certainly wouldn’t trust them with anything truly important,” says Michael.
Dueling Chatbots
One of the beauties of AI is its flexibility. Ideally, all customer interaction software would be inter-compatible so that a hypothetical app on your computer or phone could just automatically take care of billing changes, agree to changes, and simple stuff like that. But that’s not the case, and AI might bridge that gap, making it easy to sic your own personal chatbot on anything, from getting a free replacement for that broken computer to something truly impossible like getting your gym membership canceled. You may not trust a Bowder’s online DoNotPay chatbot with your personal info, but imagine having something running on your laptop or phone, a kind of virtual assistant that has access to all your relevant details, like social security number, banks accounts, and so on. You could ask it to call up and do all kinds of things for you, from changing a flight booking to getting a discount on your Internet bill. It could pause and ask you questions when it needs more info, and so on. It sounds crazy, like the kinds of sci-fi movie computers we all hoped Siri would be, but given the amazing advances in AI this year and the fact that DoNotPay’s bot will soon be available to the public, it no longer seems such a distant dream.
