Help For Refugees: Robot Lawyer Helps Fill Out Immigration Forms And Seek Asylum

The Facebook chat bot that can help you fight a parking ticket is now helping refugees seek asylum and fill out immigration papers.

The chat bot called DoNotPay, developed by Stanford Student Joshua Browder, was originally designed to help users get free legal advice to enable them to challenge parking tickets. It worked: Within two years of the bot's release, it had overturned more than 160,000 tickets.

Browder has since updated the bot, and it's no longer limited to legal advice on parking and traffic tickets but has expanded to advising on immigration as well. The newest addition to the app can help refugees in the United States and Canada fill out the proper immigration forms, and in the UK it can help them apply for asylum support as well.

The bot is accessible on Facebook Messenger, making it available to most people with an Android or Apple device or computer. "I wanted to make sure I got it right because it’s such a complicated issue. I kept showing it to lawyers throughout the process and I’d go back and tweak it," Browder told The Guardian. He consulted with lawyers for months, refining the questions and responses the bot uses to help determine which form refugees should fill out and to guide them through the process of filling it out as well.

Browder told the Guardian that he has hopes of expanding the bot to different languages and apps as well to make it available to more people.