Facebook has an answer for swipe fatigue.
Yes, it’s AI.
Facebook Dating, Meta’s dating app feature housed within the Facebook app, rolled out an AI assistant on Monday to help people find matches.
“People are really tired of swiping through hundreds of profiles to eventually get to a match and a date,” Neha Kumar, a product manager on Facebook Dating, told Business Insider. “We’re trying to figure out: How can we tackle this challenge that is pretty pervasive in dating?”
Facebook’s new AI dating assistant is a chatbot experience that lets users search for compatible matches — skipping over the swipe.
“You could say, ‘find someone that I could bring home to my parents’ or ‘find a Brooklyn tech bro who would go to EDM concerts with me’ and it’ll sift through all of the people in our ecosystem and find the right person for you,” Kumar explained.
The AI assistant, built using Meta’s Llama models, can also be prompted for dating advice, such as troubleshooting what to say to a match or finding a first date spot.
Anything the assistant recommends is based on what’s publicly available on a user’s profile. For example, if you prompted the assistant to find someone to go to EDM concerts with, the assistant would find people with those interests on their profiles.
“It’s not pulling implied info,” Kumar said.
The assistant is not one of Meta’s AI companions that have established characters that resemble people, Kumar added.
Facebook is rolling out its AI assistant feature to users in the US and Canada. The app is also launching another feature called “Meet Cute,” which automatically matches users with another person based on Facebook’s matching algorithm once a week. (If it’s not a fit, you can unmatch.)
Facebook Dating wants young adults
Launched in 2019, Facebook Dating may not be the first dating app that comes to mind, but it’s trying to pitch itself to young users as an alternative to dating apps like Hinge or Bumble.
The app has no monetization like paywalls, Kumar said.
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“We very much don’t want to go down that route,” she said.
Facebook said that matches among young adults are up 10% year over year, and that hundreds of thousands of young adults in the US and Canada make FB dating accounts each month.
To encourage more young adults to use the dating feature, Facebook has marketing campaigns lined up, said Tiffany Lin, a product marketing manager.
In October, Facebook will run a “taildating” experience at the State Fair of Texas, where rival football teams for the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma will face off, Lin said. There, the company will advertise FB dating’s recent features, like its AI assistant.
AI’s online dating takeover
Facebook’s not the first to pitch an AI solution for online dating.
The largest dating apps are also discussing how to incorporate AI into their apps.
Bumble’s CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, for instance, told The Wall Street Journal last month that the company is developing a new AI-powered dating experience. And Hinge CEO Justin McLeod has said that AI could improve people’s dating app experiences, such as improving matchmaking capabilities.
