Online dating giants are racing to develop AI-powered “wingmen” who can teach frustrated Gen Z users the way to craft higher pick-up lines and spark romance.
Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and Grindr said they’re developing or testing AI tools and chatbot assistants designed to do every thing from creating icebreakers and constructing profiles to providing feedback on users' flirting.
“AI will help people make higher connections,” AJ Balance, chief product officer at Grindr, told the Financial Times. “It's just like the friend on the bar who helps you ask someone out – but in a virtual context.”
This industry shift toward AI-powered relationship advice and training comes at a time when so-called dating app fatigue, especially amongst younger users, continues to plague the web dating market.
Online dating groups are betting that personalized feedback and advice from AI chatbots will bring upset daters back to their products.
According to Balance, Grindr's chatbot assistant, called Grindr Wingman, can prevent burnout by helping users overcome the “biggest pain points” of online dating, similar to generating conversation starters based on users' individual profiles and chat histories.
He added that artificial intelligence could ultimately eliminate the labor of online dating: “The idea of a wingman talking to a different person's wingman, perhaps to see what a date can be like or to seek out out common interests, is something value exploring,” he said.
Tinder, the product that first popularized browsing potential partners' profiles by swiping left or right, has also stated that it intends to make use of AI to “support daters throughout their dating journey” “inside the following twelve months.”
The company has already begun a limited rollout of an AI profiling tool designed to “ease the burden of photo selection.” It scans a user's personal photos and selects one of the best images. Bumble has announced that additionally it is working on the same feature.
The moves come as online dating groups struggle to draw recent users. Shares of $830 million Bumble, which owns Badoo and Fruitz in addition to the female-focused dating app of the identical name, plunged greater than 25 percent in August after the corporate cut its revenue forecast and acknowledged that a recent brand restructuring had not yet revived user growth.
Meanwhile, $9.6 billion dating giant Match Group is under pressure from activist investors to show around its biggest product, Tinder, after the corporate reported a seventh consecutive quarter of declines within the variety of paying subscribers within the three months to June.
A survey conducted by OnePoll in March found that greater than three-quarters of dating app users have experienced burnout, with 40 percent of them attributing their exhaustion to repeated failures to find the appropriate partner.
Hinge, Match Group's other major product alongside Tinder, also says it has the “ultimate goal” of creating users feel “like they’ve a private (AI-powered) matchmaker within the app.”
The relationship-focused app, which continues to grow despite the recent lull in Tinder and Bumble, was the primary mainstream dating product to supply users answers to questions like “How to win me over by…” or “The dumbest thing about me is…” of their profile.
Hinge announced that the corporate plans to launch a chatbot tool that may provide AI-generated feedback on users' responses to its signature prompts.
Match Group added that it’s investing in recruiting AI talent as a “game-changing” priority for its core dating products. The company said engineers from Hyperconnect, the South Korean social media company it acquired in 2021, can be used to develop AI tools at Tinder and Hinge.
According to Balance, Grindr is hiring relationship experts and sexual health experts to make sure its chatbot assistant gives users positive advice, while Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones said her company's AI “conversational assistance” will “help our customers gain the boldness to look their best.”
Some experts are usually not yet convinced.
“The ultimate goal of all that is to show love into an efficient mediating activity quite than an unpredictable accident,” said Carolina Bandinelli, a researcher on the University of Warwick. “And I don't think that's possible.”
