A new (and free) chatbot may help employees determine if they were harassed

(This post originally appeared on The Washington Post)

An employee has an “inappropriate moment.” Maybe it was a misunderstanding, Or maybe it was worse: he or she was just subjected to harassment or discrimination. Getting the facts of what happened can be challenging.

But it’s a problem that must be addressed. That’s because workplace issues like harassment and discrimination are a hot topic for employers this year. Challenges, however, create opportunities for entrepreneurs — and a six-person start-up called Spot is rising to the occasion. The company has just launched a free application that can help your employees determine if they were harassed while on the job.

Spot is a company — and it’s also a chatbot. It uses artificial intelligence to ask questions and record the answers of an employee — anonymously — and then, based on the answers, help determine if an inappropriate incident took place. The bot will also define what constitutes harassment and walks the user through the steps needed to report an incident.

These “cognitive interviews,” as the company calls them, are programmed to ask practical and neutral questions objectively and without bias. The idea is that being interviewed by a nonhuman chatbot makes for a more relaxed and comfortable experience. It’s also scalable for bigger companies and available 24/7.

“There are a lot of hurdles to reporting these kinds of experiences,” said Spot cofounder and chief scientist Julia Shaw, in an interview with VentureBeat. “It’s incredibly easy to forget things or misremember them, which is why it’s important to record them when the memories are fresh.”

The company is working on a revenue model for itself where fees are charged to human resources departments that make use of the service.

So what’s the result? The interview creates an encrypted record and generates a private report with time stamps which can be used as evidence if the case escalates into a lawsuit. After its download, the data is deleted from the company’s servers.

Spot isn’t the ultimate solution for determining whether an incident of harassment or discrimination took place. But it’s certainly a helpful way — at a minimum — to determine whether there’s a pattern. I’m sure plenty of more products like this will be coming in the future.