Dating apps develop AI ‘wingmen’ to generate better chat-up lines

Online dating giants are racing to create AI-powered “wingmen” that can coach frustrated Gen Z users on how to craft better chat-up lines and develop a budding romance.

Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and Grindr said they are building or testing AI tools and chatbot assistants to do everything from generate icebreakers and building profiles to providing feedback on user flirting.

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

This industry pivot towards AI-powered relationship advice and coaching comes as so-called dating app fatigue, particularly among younger users, continues to plague the online matchmaking market.

Online dating groups are betting that personalised feedback and advice from AI chatbots will bring disappointed daters back to their products. 

Balance said Grindr’s chatbot assistant, called the Grindr Wingman, would fend off burnout by helping users overcome the “biggest pain points” of online dating, including by generating conversation prompts based on users’ unique profiles and chat histories.

He added AI could ultimately eliminate the hard work of online dating: “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, the product that first popularised the act of sorting through prospective matches’ profiles by swiping left or right, has likewise said that it aims to use AI “to support daters throughout the entire dating journey” within “the coming 12 months”.

The company has already begun a limited rollout of an AI profile-building tool, designed to alleviate “the burden of photo selection”, which scans a user’s personal photos and selects the best images. Bumble has said it is also developing a similar feature.

The moves come as online dating groups struggle to attract new users. Shares in $830mn Bumble, which owns the eponymous female-focused dating app as well as Badoo and Fruitz, tumbled more than 25 per cent in August after the company slashed its revenue outlook and acknowledged that a recent brand overhaul had not yet reignited user growth.

Meanwhile the $9.6bn giant of the dating industry Match Group is under pressure from activist investors to deliver a turnaround at its largest product, Tinder, which reported a seventh consecutive quarter of declines in paying subscriber numbers in the three months to June. 

A survey by OnePoll in March found that more than three quarters of dating app users had experienced burnout, with 40 per cent of them blaming their exhaustion on repeated failures to find a good match. 

Hinge, Match Group’s other major product besides Tinder, said it was also pursuing the “ultimate goal” of users feeling “like they have a personal matchmaker (driven by AI) inside the app”.

The relationship-focused app, which has continued to grow amid the recent slowdown at Tinder and Bumble, was the first mainstream dating product to provide prompts for users to answer on their profiles, such as “The way to win me over is . . . ” or “The dorkiest thing about me is . . . ”.

Hinge said it was planning to launch a chatbot tool offering AI-generated feedback on user answers to its signature prompts.

Match Group added it is investing in recruiting AI talent as a “game-changing” priority for its flagship dating products. The company said engineers from Hyperconnect, the South Korean social media company it acquired in 2021, would be redirected to build AI tools at Tinder and Hinge. 

Balance said Grindr was hiring relationship experts and sexual health experts to ensure that its chatbot assistant provided positive advice to users, while Bumble chief executive Lidiane Jones said that her company’s AI “conversation support” would “help our customers gain confidence to be their best selves”. 

Some experts remain unconvinced.

“The endpoint of all this is about turning love into an efficient matchmaking activity rather than an unpredictable turn of destiny,” said Carolina Bandinelli, a researcher at the University of Warwick. “And I don’t think that’s possible.”