Imagine just having a machine to do this for you (Credits: Getty Images)
An artificially intelligent chatbot has sucessfully negotiated a lower bill for an engineer in the United States.
The robot spoke to representatives from network provider Comcast on behalf of the engineer through a live chat feature.
It argued the services weren’t sufficient and threatened to pursue legal action. In return, the representative agreed to take $10 off the monthly bill.
The engineer in question works for DoNotPay – a US company committed to helping people save money and fight bureaucracy by using artificial intelligence.
And Joshua Browder, the CEO of DoNotPay, shared the video of the bot arguing with the Comcast representative to demonstrate its effectiveness.
‘The AI just exaggerated the Internet outages, similar to how a customer would,’ he explained.
‘Not perfect yet, such as saying [insert email address]. The AI is also a bit too polite, replying back to everything. But it was enough to get a discount.’
DoNotPay built the chatbot using the ChatGPT framework released by San Francisco-based OpenAI earlier this month.
While it’s not quite ready for a public release yet, Browder says that’s the ultimate aim.
He forsees the chatbot being able to do things like cancel a customer’s subscription or negotiate a credit report for them – without any need for the human to do anything.
‘We’ve trained this AI to be like a robot lawyer for consumers, and I imagine that the disputes that we can handle have now gone up significantly because we can handle cases where you can respond rather than just sending one template,’ Browder told The Verge.
Throughout the conversation with the customer service rep, the chatbot sounds convincingly human. But Browder says they need to do a bit of tweaking before it’s made public.
For example, the final version will be a bit more hard-nosed with a few less ‘thank-yous’ but it also won’t exaggerate the argument as much.
‘We won’t allow for exaggeration of facts in the final version,’ Browder told The Verge.
‘But it will still be aggressive, citing laws and having an emotional appeal.’
If the chatbot is faced with a question it can’t answer, it will seek help from the user. So there may still be a bit of personal interaction needed.
But still, employing a machine to manage the horror of bill negotiations is a pleasant thought.
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Watch it successfully knock $120 off a yearly internet bill.
