Bumble is testing an AI dating assistant called “Bee” that it hopes will help users find a date without swiping through profiles. bloomberg Writes. The company announced the AI assistant during its fourth quarter earnings, and intends to use AI in a new experience it calls “Dates.”
When a user opts into Bumble’s Dates feature, Bee conducts an onboarding chat where it learns about the users’ “values, relationship goals, communication style, lifestyle, and dating intentions” and then attempts to find other users who share some or all of those qualities. Once Bee finds a compatible person, both users are notified in the app that they could be a great match, and receive a summary generated by Bee explaining why this is so. From there, they can chat and see if things lead to a real-life date.
As is often the case with pie-in-the-sky AI features, Bumble has even bigger plans for how Bee can be used in its app, including as a tool to collect anonymous feedback from a user’s past matches or as a way to get suggestions for date ideas. AI will apparently enable Bumble to move away from binary yes or no swipes on profiles and toward a system where users connect with “chapter-based” profiles that are more reflective of their life story.
Bumble is testing Bee internally and plans to launch the AI and its Dates feature in beta soon. The company is far from the only dating app experimenting with integrating AI recommendations and summaries. Tinder uses AI to recommend profile pictures to users, and now offers another feature called “Chemistry” that combines insights gained from personal questions and access to users’ camera rolls to create more informative matches. Meanwhile, Grindr’s “Edge” subscription tier offers AI summaries of past chats and connections and statistics about whether a user is actually compatible with a new match.
It’s too early to tell whether AI makes a meaningful difference to the dating experience for users, but if it keeps them from using the app or paying for a membership, it’s probably a worthwhile experiment for Bumble, Tinder, and Grindr.
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