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Summary: Researcher Dr. Yoshua Bengio will act as strategy adviser to legal tech startup company Botler AI.
Montreal-based legal tech startup Botler AI provides free help to users navigating the legal path required for immigration. The company announced today that Dr. Yoshua Bengio will be joining them as a strategy adviser. Bengio is one of the key researchers that helped establish the field of deep learning.
Bengio explained in a press release announcing the addition, “I knew this was an idea that we needed to take to the next level. I want AI to be developed towards positive social impact and this is one place where beneficial AI must happen. Deep learning could help provide affordable or even free legal services to people who might otherwise not be able to have access.”
The techniques developed by Bengio and others has resulted in the breakthroughs of natural language comprehension and translation needed for the kind of chatbots that the company relies on to help its users.
Amir Moravej, a software engineer from Iran, founded Botler AI. He moved to Canada in order to pursue higher education and work opportunities in technology. However, he has trouble navigating the formal immigration process in Canada and was forced to leave Canada when his work permit expired. He had to wait for the government to review his application for permanent residency, promoting his idea to start a company that would have benefited him and would be able to help others going through the same process.
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Moravej said, “The moment that I had to leave, I realized that this whole immigration system and the legal procedures behind that is very complicated, and I wanted to learn more about the process.” He dove into government websites and online discussion boards to learn more about the process and how to better help others work through it. He found “an overload of information” that was complex. Botler AI initially started as a FAQ chatbot last June that could give answers to immigration-related questions by users. It then evolved and was relaunched a few months ago as a chatbot that was able to lead users through the entire process of completing an immigration application.
“The main goal of launching the chatbot at that time was to help students who got affected by the new immigration policy changes in the US,” Moravej said. He is referring to the executive order Trump issued that has since been halted by judges.
Botler AI is only able to help those seeking residency in Quebec but is planning to expand. They plan to use deep learning “to empower Botler AI’s natural language understanding, image recognition, and document classification” and to “help us move towards a general chatbot in the legal field, and understand more languages.” This means they are working towards being able to do more than just immigration. Moravej said, “Our goal now is not just to stay in immigration. The whole legal system and legal procedures are really complicated for average consumers, and the only alternative right now is to hire a lawyer, which is very expensive, and what we want to do is make legal services really, really affordable or, in many cases, free for everyone.”
Do you think legal services should be free? Tell us in the comments below.
To learn more about legal tech startups, read these articles:
- Malaysia and Singapore Law Firms Launch Fintech Practice
- Ten Startup Companies Capitalizing on Legal Software Demands
- Zapproved Offers New Technological Legal Services
Photo: tamtams.ca
