Meta has announced two new AI-powered features coming to Facebook Dating: a dating assistant and Meet Cute. The company hopes these will help users "skip the swipe" and connect with people without having to pay to unlock core product features.
The first feature, the dating assistant, is, as Meta puts it, a "chat assistant within Facebook Dating that gives you personalized help on your dating journey." The way it works is by letting you use prompts to find more specific matches based on your interests. You can go far beyond simple filters and enter a request like, "Find me a Brooklyn girl in tech". The assistant can also suggest dating ideas or give tips to "level up your profile". For now, this tool is gradually rolling out in the US and Canada.
The other feature is Meet Cute, which uses the service"s personalized matching algorithm to automatically give you a surprise match. Meta claims this is ideal for people who are "tired of swiping" and want to expand beyond their "typical pool of dating candidates". These matches will happen weekly at first, but the company says it is looking into other frequencies in the future.
Facebook Dating launched six years ago in the US on September 5, 2019, nearly sixteen months after its initial reveal. Its expansion into Europe saw a bit of a delay; originally planned for early 2020, it was pushed to October of that year after Irish regulators raised data protection questions.
From the beginning, the platform tried to be different from other dating apps. There is no swiping. Instead, you have to comment directly on someone"s profile or hit a like button to register your interest.
Speaking of other dating apps, back in June, Tinder started requiring new users in California to use facial recognition to verify their profiles. The process involves taking a short video selfie, which a third-party technology then uses to create a biometric scan to confirm the person is real and not a catfish. Tinder claims the video itself is deleted after verification.