If you dread the thought of calling to change an airline ticket or negotiate your internet bill, a new artificial intelligence tool may provide a solution.
DoNotPay, which offers an assortment of consumer-friendly services like tracking subscriptions, generating burner phone numbers, and searching for unclaimed property, now features a bot that will call customer service numbers for users, navigate through phone menus and sit through hold music, then politely but firmly advocate on users’ behalf.
The company shared examples of its AI calling a cellphone provider for help porting a phone number and talking with an airline to cancel a flight within the 24-hour cancellation window. Joshua Browder, CEO and founder of DoNotPay, says getting updates on lost luggage and seeking compensation for flight delays are also common use cases.
DoNotPay already offered tools to connect to customer service agents via chat windows, and to draft and send emails, faxes, and even snail mail to companies on behalf of users. But while the service’s artificial intelligence had enough smarts to wait on hold for users, then hand over a call when an agent was available, until recently AI models were not capable of carrying on a convincing voice conversation with a human operator in real time.
Browder says that changed with Open AI’s GPT-4o model, unveiled in May.
“That has reduced the delay by about 70%, so instead of it taking three seconds to come up with a response, it now takes under a second, and that’s finally fast enough to hold these phone conversations,” he says. “So now we’re doing thousands of these calls.”
In general, the company’s offerings—currently available for $18 per month—have evolved over time with AI technology, moving from generating letters to challenge bills or parking tickets by mostly splicing customer information into prewritten templates to using generative AI to create content for each communication. Open AI’s GPT-4 was the first model DoNotPay found powerful enough to enable online chat negotiations, just as GPT-4o was the first it found speedy enough to effectively pick up the phone.
Browder says DoNotPay has also moved away from efforts to act as a “robot lawyer” (at one point in early 2023, he had vowed to have the bot tell someone in a courtroom what to say during a legal proceeding, only to back down after he said he received threats of prosecution). Last month the company agreed to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, which would require it to pay $193,000 and give warning to customers who subscribed between 2021 and 2023 about the limitations of the attorney-like services it offered at the time.
“The legal stuff was not a focus for the past few years,” Browder says.
DoNotPay’s voice-enabled tool typically gathers some basic information through an online form when a customer first invokes it, then dials in to the appropriate customer service line. If any questions come up during the call that the bot can’t answer, like if it needs additional account information or a purchase confirmation number, it will text the user for help, telling the customer service agent it’s looking up the information.
Owing in part to limitations in the AI, and out of a desire not to overwhelm small businesses with robocalls, the service makes calls only to big companies like airlines, utilities, and major retailers. It also generally doesn’t talk to government agencies, which can be more particular about talking to the actual affected person. And while it identifies itself as an “assistant,” it doesn’t proclaim to be a bot or an AI tool unless it’s explicitly asked, in which case it answers truthfully. In one example shared by Browder, the bot was repeatedly asked for its own name after it explained that it was calling as the user’s assistant, hesitating until it finally said “Go ahead and call me Alex.”
Browder says DoNotPay provides recordings to users of the conversations its bots have on their behalf, adding that some find rooting for the AI as gratifying as any actual economic benefit they might receive. “It’s almost like ESPN for saving money,” he says.
Still, assuming DoNotPay’s bot and potential competitors become commonplace, one question is whether big companies will instruct customer service agents not to talk to robot agents. Browder points out that some companies already use bots to talk to their customers, and suggests that lawmakers could protect consumers’ rights to use their own AI.
And while such a law doesn’t seem likely to materialize in the near future, Browder seems intent on continuing to adapt his company’s offerings to take advantage of still-evolving generative AI tools—and ensure they deliver value for subscribers beyond what they can get from general purpose AI tools.
“I think that consumer expectations are constantly increasing, and that’s why we’re improving the product, because admittedly now someone could just go to ChatGPT to generate a parking ticket appeal letter,” he says. “So you constantly have to improve the product to keep fighting for the subscribers.”
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