Another new entrant to the emerging voice-enabled technology slate of legal technology tools, Larissa, is hoping that voice technology can be used to promote access to justice for divorce and family law-related questions. Tom Martin, founder of bot automation company LawDroid, designed Larissa as a way to help people better understand how to navigate divorce and family law, even if they can’t bring an attorney on board right away. “They make a phone call to a lawyer, and the lawyer just doesn’t have time for them, or they want you to put a retainer down first. Some folks just don’t have that,” he said. Here’s a look at the new tool: Who it serves: If you’re getting a divorce and have no idea where to even start, you fall directly into Larissa’s core audience. What it does: Larissa is a voice bot. Essentially, you click a little microphone, and Larissa will guide you through a conversation about divorce. The bot additionally has a little text-based interface that will help you think of the questions you might need. What it’s trying to do: Martin designed the bot on the thinking that there should be a space for people to verbally ask questions in layman’s terms about legal issues, in this case divorce, for free. “It’s geared toward real people that don’t really understand legalese, and they just have questions about what divorce means,” he said. The bot makes information additionally accessible to folks who aren’t necessarily able to read through a bunch of web resources. Moreover, because Larissa is a bot, it can be scaled to reach far more people than your average lawyer, and can even be integrated into some legal aid organizations’ outreach structures. What’s the interface like? It’s certainly not inaccessible, but there are parts of Larissa’s interface that feel a little strange. Larissa definitely sounds robotic, lacking in the kind of tonal emphasis and pausing you might expect from a person, or even to some degree voice tools like Siri or Amazon Alexa. The tool itself is also encased in a Windows 98-style graphic on a black background, making it seem a little like you’re talking to a robot through a black hole. Then again, that could be kind of a cool feature, depending on how you look at it. Bots are a dime a dozen these days. Does this one actually work? It seems to. Larissa is built on Dialogflow, Google’s voice conversational assistant framework. This meant Martin was able to program in dozens of example questions on the backend, essentially allowing Larissa to pick out the right piece of information to serve back to you. Larissa’s comprehension seems pretty good, and its answers get right to the point. Where it gets a little murkier, Martin noted, is with questions that trigger multiple different concepts—keeping that straight within the back-end is a little beyond the scope of the Dialogflow framework. A question about divorce that asks about both the time in the process and the necessary components, for example, might confuse Larissa. “That’s a problem that still needs to be solved better than it can be right now,” Martin explained.