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DoNotPay Housing — A bot to help the homeless and evicted fight for housing
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Replies
Joyjeet Sarkar
This is really cool Joshua. I hope its adaptable to typos and other edge cases (someone typing Si, instead of Yes).
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Love the UX --> scary, confusing legal world wrapped into a friendly, bite-size and guided interface.
One ux tip: Right now, the responses feel automatic and rushed. It doesn't actually feel like chatting with a person. Penny (https://www.pennyapp.io/) does a great job of pacing the conversation and making it appear as if a real human is chatting with you. This is small but I can really feel the difference as a user.
Good luck!
From the maker who brought us DoNotPay, then turned it into a bot and got press coverage pretty much everywhere for saving parking fines for how many thousands of people?!!!
Now there is help for people losing/who have lost, their homes... This has already been picked up by The Washington Post: This robot lawyer helps the newly evicted file for housing aid
@jbrowder1 Ground breaking product, UX, and founder. Seriously one of the most game changing products I've seen helping solve some of the most annoying things like parking, delayed flights, and more. I'm SO excited to see him tackling problems like housing and helping the homeless. It's amazing when groundbreaking and novel products are doing good for the world too.
Major props Josh!! Been an honor watching you grind this out. Onward!
Hey Joshua,
Offering advice and assistance is a great use case for a bot - nice work.
Many people in dire housing/homelessness situations are unaware of their rights, so products such as this can have a huge impact.
As those in homeless situations may not have access to the internet, are you considering an SMS bot?
I was recently at a hackathon organised by the housing and homelessness charity Shelter, and created something similar. I wrote an article on it: https://chatbotsmagazine.com/mee...
👍🏻
@aemholland hey Antony, thank you for the kind feedback and the great suggestion. I did think about it and completely agree that access to Internet is a huge problem for being able to help vulnerable groups. At the moment, it is not sustainable to do SMS because of the cost (since all the bots are completely free). However, if I can find a way, I would love to do it. On a side note, I am a big fan of your work. All the best, Josh
Hey! I am the maker of the DoNotPay "robot lawyer", which has previously helped a lot of people successfully appeal parking tickets (among other things).
I'm excited to expand to help the homeless and newly evicted claim housing. I find it a disgrace that London/NYC/San Francisco housing are hubs of global wealth, yet there are a record number of people on the streets.
The service is, of course, completely free. Currently, it works for the whole of the UK, but other areas are coming shortly.
Please let me know if you have any questions and find some additional information below.
Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/n...
Mashable: http://mashable.com/2016/08/10/r...
Demo Video:
