Bumble For Friends Debuts AI Features
Contributed by: kellyseal on Wednesday, December 13 2023 @ 01:38 pm
Last modified on Wednesday, December 13 2023 @ 01:48 pm
Bumble For Friends, the signature dating app’s standalone app that focuses on helping people find friends, has debuted new AI-based features.
The app announced one new feature dubbed “Plans” which helps users organize a meet-up in real life, and lets them invite up to 15 people. They can create public or private plans from the app, according to Tech Crunch, but the private plans require the planner to send invitations to specific members in their network.
The feature resembles the MeetUp app, where you can organize an event and invite members of your group to attend. Bumble offers options to grab coffee, eat out, do a workout together, “something outdoors” or a night out. Then you can make it public or private, and the last step is choosing the friends from your Bumble network to invite.
An organizer posting an event via Plan can post it on other platforms too – the feature provides a link. Users can see public plans close to them based on their location, according to Tech Crunch[*1] .
The new feature was created to make it easier to get together and do what the app sets out to do – expand your friend network.
Bumble For Friends has also launched an AI-generated ice breaker feature to help users write a first message that is based on the other person’s profile. (The example Tech Crunch gave is an AI-generated message for a book lover asking about the book club scene in San Francisco.) The prompt will appear when two users first match with one another, so they can get a conversation going quickly.
Users can edit the message to make it sound more personal or like themselves, or they can ask another question altogether. But they can only use one AI-generated icebreaker per chat, according to Tech Crunch.
Bumble’s founder and former CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd recently stepped down from the company, after building the brand to be a women-first platform. She launched Bumble For Friends last year with the aim to help people connect who might have moved to a new city, had a change in relationship status, or are just looking for new friends.
The app launched in July of this year in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the Philippines, the U.K. and the U.S. Since then, Bumble has expanded the availability of the app to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, Portugal and Spain.
According to Tech Crunch, the AI-generated icebreakers are currently only in English.
To find out more about their dating service, you can check out our Bumble review.