Hinge Offers New Video Chat Prompts

Dating app Hinge is now offering prompts via their video chat feature to help guide virtual daters towards a more engaging, fun conversation.

According to The Zoe Report, once you start chatting with someone on Hinge, the new feature will let one of you swipe through prompts to ask during the call. There are eight main types of prompts to choose, starting with The Warm-Up (which are ice-breakers to get you started). Hinge then moves on to Dive in Deep (which gets into personal questions), Behind the Scenes (insight into your daily life and habits), Not So Serious (“fun and out-of-the-box” questions), Dim the Lights (if you’re looking to get romantic), Underrated or Overrated (opinions on some more controversial or polarizing subjects), and finally Let’s Delete Hinge. The last one is assuming the call is going well and you’re going to take things offline.

Hinge has called this new offering a “virtual vibe check” so daters don’t feel the pressure to meet someone in person before having a conversation and getting a sense of who they are.

The new video call prompts are similar to the prompts that Hinge offers when a user sets up their profile, asking questions to get them to share interesting tidbits about themselves that might catch a potential match’s attention. They also give you a little more insight into someone’s personality.

Example of how Hinge Video Prompts work.

Image: Hinge

The video chat prompts are also intended to help users screen dates a little better before deciding to meet in person, but not in a heavy-handed way.

Virtual dating has exploded this year, with many apps rushing to offer in-app video chat features to their users in the hopes that they stay on the apps instead of going to third party services like Facetime. Many daters have found video chats to be helpful in connecting with people during the lockdowns.

Hinge surveyed its users earlier this year and found that 65 percent who have been on a video date plan to keep virtual dating after the pandemic, because they prefer the low-pressure step to assess compatibility with matches. The company also found that many of its users think virtual dating is awkward – and roughly two-thirds said ice breakers would help, which led Hinge to add the video call prompts.

"Hinge was the first dating app to introduce Prompts to profiles, and we're excited to bring this innovation to virtual dates," said Tim MacGougan, Chief Product Officer at Hinge. "Video Prompts helps you spark a good conversation during a video date and ultimately decide if you want to meet in person."