This A.I. lawyer can help you file for unemployment benefits

By Luke Dormehl Published April 14, 2020

Looking to avoid the stress of filing for unemployment? Simple: Get an artificial-intelligence lawyer to do it for you.

According to the latest figures, more than 16 million people in the United States have filed for unemployment benefits in recent weeks — with more than 6 million filing in the last week alone — as coronavirus-induced lockdowns have left many in the country jobless or furloughed.

Recommended Videos

While there are unemployment benefits available, though, claiming them isn’t necessarily straightforward. To help address this challenge, automated legal company DoNotPay has added unemployment filing skills to its multi-talented robot lawyer.

“DoNotPay will now help our users file and maintain unemployment status in all 50 states,” founder Joshua Browder told Digital Trends. “This includes filing all the paperwork and ‘skip waiting on hold’ if the states do require a call.”

DoNotPay Unemployment Benefit 1 — DoNotPay

The chatbot works by asking users a series of plain English questions. It then fills out their application and submits the claim as required, depending on the individual requirements of the state in question.

Browder started the A.I. legal project to help users fight parking tickets. Since then, DoNotPay has advanced into all sorts of areas — from helping you sue robocall scammers to helping protect newly unemployed people against bills they can’t afford. Unemployment assistance was the next logical step, Browder said.

“Over the past month, this has been the biggest request from our existing user base,” he told Digital Trends.

In recent months, the service has begun charging in the form of a $3 per month subscription. Users who just need unemployment help will have that fee waived.

Topics

Tech News

Former Digital Trends Contributor

I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…

Computing

Can A.I. beat human engineers at designing microchips? Google thinks so

google artificial intelligence designs microchips photo 1494083306499 e22e4a457632

Could artificial intelligence be better at designing chips than human experts? A group of researchers from Google's Brain Team attempted to answer this question and came back with interesting findings. It turns out that a well-trained A.I. is capable of designing computer microchips -- and with great results. So great, in fact, that Google's next generation of A.I. computer systems will include microchips created with the help of this experiment.

Azalia Mirhoseini, one of the computer scientists of Google Research's Brain Team, explained the approach in an issue of Nature together with several colleagues. Artificial intelligence usually has an easy time beating a human mind when it comes to games such as chess. Some might say that A.I. can't think like a human, but in the case of microchips, this proved to be the key to finding some out-of-the-box solutions.

News

Google’s LaMDA is a smart language A.I. for better understanding conversation

LaMDA model

Artificial intelligence has made extraordinary advances when it comes to understanding words and even being able to translate them into other languages. Google has helped pave the way here with amazing tools like Google Translate and, recently, with its development of Transformer machine learning models. But language is tricky -- and there’s still plenty more work to be done to build A.I. that truly understands us.
Language Model for Dialogue Applications
At Tuesday’s Google I/O, the search giant announced a significant advance in this area with a new language model it calls LaMDA. Short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, it’s a sophisticated A.I. language tool that Google claims is superior when it comes to understanding context in conversation. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted, this might be intelligently parsing an exchange like “What’s the weather today?” “It’s starting to feel like summer. I might eat lunch outside.” That makes perfect sense as a human dialogue, but would befuddle many A.I. systems looking for more literal answers.

LaMDA has superior knowledge of learned concepts which it’s able to synthesize from its training data. Pichai noted that responses never follow the same path twice, so conversations feel less scripted and more responsively natural.

Computing

How the USPS uses Nvidia GPUs and A.I. to track missing mail

A United States Postal Service USPS truck driving on a tree-lined street.

The United States Postal Service, or USPS, is relying on artificial intelligence-powered by Nvidia's EGX systems to track more than 100 million pieces of mail a day that goes through its network. The world's busiest postal service system is relying on GPU-accelerated A.I. systems to help solve the challenges of locating lost or missing packages and mail. Essentially, the USPS turned to A.I. to help it locate a "needle in a haystack."

To solve that challenge, USPS engineers created an edge A.I. system of servers that can scan and locate mail. They created algorithms for the system that were trained on 13 Nvidia DGX systems located at USPS data centers. Nvidia's DGX A100 systems, for reference, pack in five petaflops of compute power and cost just under $200,000. It is based on the same Ampere architecture found on Nvidia's consumer GeForce RTX 3000 series GPUs.