Tinder and Other Dating Apps Test AI ‘Wingman’ Concept

Would you trust AI to act as your wingman/wingwoman out in the dating world?

Online dating apps like Tinder, Grindr and Bumble certainly hope so, according to a report Friday (Aug. 30) by the Financial Times (FT), which said these companies are building/testing artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can generate icebreakers and offer feedback on user flirting.

“AI is going to help people make better connections,” Grindr chief product officer AJ Balance told FT. “It’s that friend in the bar who’s helping you to ask someone out — but in the virtual context.”

The report noted that this shift toward AI-powered relationship help comes amid a “dating app fatigue,” especially among younger users. Dating companies are hoping that getting personalized advice from chatbots could help woo these daters back to their sites.

Balance said Grindr’s chatbot assistant, called the Grindr Wingman, would help customers deal with the “biggest pain points” of online dating, by doing things like offering up conversation prompts based on users’ profiles and chat histories. He argued AI could someday take the hard work out of dating online.

“The idea of a wingman talking to someone else’s wingman, maybe to see what it’d be like to go on a date or to find common areas of interest, is something that’s worth exploring,” he said.

Tinder, meanwhile, is also working on a plan to use AI “to support daters throughout the entire dating journey” with plans to roll out this feature in “the coming 12 months,” the report said.

In addition to AI-powered wingmen, dating apps have also used AI to help weed out fake, spam or scam profiles. Bumble said its initial testing of this technology found it blocked 95% of these bogus accounts automatically.

“Our most recent research made one thing very clear: Our members are anxious about the authenticity of their matches,” the company said at the time.

In related news, PYMNTS wrote recently about banks’ use of AI-powered assistants, and an effort by regulators targeting “time-wasting chatbots” used by lenders.

“But we note that the AI-driven chatbots, though not perfect, are evolving. As detailed in bank earnings reports and elsewhere, the features have been improving internal, back-office functions and consumer-facing events,” PYMNTS wrote. “We reported last year in one tracker that the top 14 global investment banks could supercharge their front-office productivity by 25% by using generative AI and bots.”

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