A smart legal robot in use at a public legal center in Meilan district [Photo/ People’s Daily]

A member of the public use a smart robot to acquire legal knowledge. [Photo/ People’s Daily]

A smart legal robot was introduced in a public legal service center at a community in the Meilan district of Haikou, capital of Southern China’s Hainan province, on July 4.

A man asked the robot “Is it reasonable to expect extra pay if working overtime during the probation period?” The robot, it turns out, was familiar with labor law.

The robot has a large database of legal information which can offer solutions to more than 40,000 problems about litigation procedures and more than 30,000 common legal problems.

The database includes more than 7,000 laws and five million cases which can help answer questions on marriage and family issues, labor matters, traffic accidents and neighborhood disputes.

Apart from talking with the robot, citizens can also choose questions by touching its screen. It offers free and professional legal service consultation to citizens by natural language processing, keyword matching and big data of legal information.

The public can also get access to 24-hour professional legal service on the WeChat accounts of the local justice bureau, “Meilan legal publicity” and “Smart legal publicity”.