I created a chatbot to help immigrants
At YoTengo, we are building a chatbot that solves the Access to Justice Gap. The Access to Justice Gap is broadly understood as the woeful state of legal services for the poor and otherwise unempowered. The law can be a powerful tool to help the oppressed or the oppressor.
I got the idea to build a chatbot to help people with their legal problems when I began to feel a little like a robot myself. I was doing free legal consults at a local immigrant-aid organization and answering the exact same questions for the fifth time that day. Folks had taken the day off work to come wait in line and talk to me about their legal situations to find out what could be done. Some had waited weeks for the opportunity. Another non-profit near my law office sees people lining up at 4 A.M. to pay $100 for an immigration consult and the opportunity to have pro-bono representation. I know that losing a day of work to talk to a lawyer is a big deal for people who make so little and have so many demands on their paycheck.
If I could figure out most of the conversations ahead of time and program them in to a computer, I could automate the process.
As I pondered the problem, I became convinced that the conversation that transpires in a legal consult needed to be a part of the solution. Blog posts, online quizzes, and flyers were not giving people the answers they wanted. 2016 was the year of the chatbot and the hype swept me up. I started studying how I could create a chatbot and combine the conversational aspect of a legal consult with the positive aspects of a computer.
My law firm’s primary work focuses on helping Spanish-speaking immigrant children and crime victims. I created a bot that could help address the needs of these two groups. Thanks to the help of a very smart immigrant and developer named Vik Yankov (who I found thanks to Medium), I was able to develop a multi-lingual architecture and launch the first version of the bot in November of 2017. The third version of our bot has now had over 1000 conversations and identified over 100 people that qualify for immigration relief.
In 1963, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Gideon v. Wainwright saying, “The right of one charged with crime to counsel may not be deemed fundamental and essential to fair trials in some countries, but it is in ours.”
This landmark decision established the right to counsel in criminal proceedings. There is no equivalent right to an attorney in the immigration system. Instead, immigrants hide in the shadows, present inadequate defenses or choose not to attend court. Fear, language barriers, lack of education and financial resources are amongst the myriad of factors that keep immigrants from enjoying the rights and privileges that they deserve.
Our chatbot is helping to change this situation by providing free, 24/7 advice to people on their phones. People often think of additional questions after their consults with an attorney. Chatbots love follow up questions.
This allows immigrants to get answers to their legal questions without having to take off work or pay for a consult!
Our chatbot is currently “button driven” due to technical constraints. In the next edition of our bot, we will add NLP and more forms of immigration relief. The bot will soon be able to execute small legal tasks to help law firms deliver services more efficiently and affordably. Over time, we plan to add additional legal verticals to the bot’s skill set. Our initial focus on building a bot that can easily learn new skills and languages is will allow us to rapidly and consistently roll out product improvements.
We have a lot of challenges facing us in our endeavor. Artificial Intelligence and Conversational Interfaces are new and unknown technologies. Many different startups are competing with us for capital and clients. Our product roadmap is robust, but depends on capital and attorney cooperation to ultimately succeed. Over the next couple of months, I will explain how we plan to address the problems and opportunities involved in the creation of a legal chatbot company.
Chat with the bot here: http://m.me/yotengobot