Tinder believes the solution lies in an AI-infused experience.
On Thursday the company announced a long list of new features to be deployed in the app in the coming months.
Starting Thursday, users in the US and Canada will be able to take advantage of a feature called “Chemistry,” which will give users a daily AI-curated recommendation of potential matches. In a press release, Tinder described it as “an AI-powered way to take the fatigue out of dating.”
The AI will learn more about you through a Q&A, and if you choose, it will scan your camera roll to understand “things like your interests, lifestyle, and personality themes,” the company said. The Camera Roll Scan feature isn’t available on the app yet, but it will begin testing in Australia, Canada, and the US later this year.
While the “Chemistry” feature is limited to certain countries, users globally can turn on “Learning Mode” if they really want Tinder’s AI to give them information about their personality and tastes. In this mode, Tinder’s AI recommendation system will constantly collect information about you whenever you use the app, and use it to decide which profiles to recommend to you.
Tinder believes in features. According to internal testing, women who used the “learning mode” feature were more likely to return to the app within the first week.
The company said the goal is to eventually expand these AI curation capabilities beyond a few features and integrate them into the entire Tinder experience.
“With more than half of our users under the age of 30, we’re building a generation that wants dating to feel more authentic, less pressured, and worth their time,” Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Match Group, Tinder’s parent company, said in the press release. “We’re using AI to offer more relevant connections, and continuing to raise the level of security so people feel confident taking the next step. Overall, these changes mark the most significant evolution of our app in years and make Tinder more trustworthy, social, intelligent, and expressive.”
Also starting in a few weeks in some parts of the US is testing a “Photo Enhance” feature, which will use AI to help you edit the photos you post on your profile.
The company is also turning to AI to address user security issues with dating apps.
“Are you sure?” A feature called “Does It Bother You?”, which alerts users before they send potentially offensive text, is getting LLM-Reconstruction, and so is “Does it Bother You?”, a feature that detects inappropriate messages, helps receivers report them, and will now also auto-blur any flagged content.
“These enhancements go beyond keyword recognition to context-aware understanding of the tone and nuances of conversations, leading to smart prompts that reinforce respectful behavior in real-time,” the company said in a press release.
Earlier this week, Bumble also made a similar AI announcement, introducing an opt-in AI assistant called “Dates” that will first try to understand more about the user in a private conversation with the chatbot and then match users based on compatibility.
Both Bumble and Tinder, once the two dominant dating apps in the glory days of online dating, have been affected by the disillusionment of the great Gen Z dating apps. Match, which also owns the popular Hinge dating app, is dealing with a steady decline in customers.
All bets are off on whether this new AI push by dating apps will actually lead to an increase in users, but past data says “AI + romance” is not the combination younger users are looking for. A Bloomberg Intelligence survey last summer found that Gen Z becomes uncomfortable with AI features on dating apps, even more than Millennials.
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