Match

Match.com Chatbot Laura

In Her, Spike Jonze's 2013 romantic science fiction film, a man falls in love with an intelligent computer operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The concept is futuristic, but feels increasingly less so by the day. With the introduction of Lara, a new Facebook chatbot from Match.com, the reality of Her is closer than ever.

Lara is designed to help singletons navigate the tricky world of dating in the digital age. Via the Facebook Messenger app, the bot uses contextual understanding and speech recognition to provide advice and guidance.

"Throughout a casual conversation, Lara will ask for some personal details, including age, location and sexual preference before inviting users to set up a Match account, all without leaving Messenger," explained Match.com in a press release.

Singles may be increasingly willing to split the check on dates, but searching for love remains a pricey endeavor. A coffee here, dinner there, drinks afterwards, a movie on weekends… it all adds up, but to how much?

According to Match.com’s ‘Singles in America’ study, an annual survey of 5,000 singles around the United States, the average unmarried American spent $1,596 on their dating life in 2016. In major cities, that average is higher. In New York City, for instance, it’s $2,069.

The average includes the things you’d expect - the aforementioned bar tabs and dinners - as well as dating site memberships and matchmakers, and entry fees for dating events. It also includes tangential purchases like haircuts, manicures, and new date outfits.

Online dating has become more accessible than ever, but unfortunately, it’s also created a culture of ghosting and messaging among users that often doesn't lead to an actual date. Apps like Tinder made online dating easy and fun, but many daters have become frustrated with the game-like interface and the lack of any real connection with other daters. Many apps are trying to address this pain point by helping daters meet in person more quickly, which is key to forming romantic connections.

Dating app Stay launched last month in the iTunes store (called "Stay Dating" on iTunes) with a focus on in-person connections. The company encourages all matches to schedule dates; it's built into the app’s functionality.

With Stay, users can’t message right away, eliminating the ghosting problem that is so problematic with other dating apps. Users can only suggest times and potential locations to matches to set up a date. Once scheduled, users can start messaging (but only 24 hours before the date). If a user cancels the date or fails to show and gets reported, that user is blocked from viewing matches over the next 24 hours.

See All Dating Apps on Map

With the amount of media attention Tinder receives, you’d think it was the only dating app on the market - or if not the only option, at least the most popular one.

But the numbers tell a different story. Technology company Quantcast reviewed over 480,000 searches from January 6, 2017 - February 5, 2017 to discover which dating services singles in America prefer. They found that not only do different states have different preferences, preferences seem to come in clusters. And they’re not always what you’d expect.

Overall, old-school dating service PlentyOfFish won the most states with its free app. It may not have the hype of its newer, fancier competitors, but in this case slow and steady won the race. POF was especially popular in the south, southwest, and midwest.

Consumer Reports has decided to get into the love game. The non-profit organization has been around since 1936, and typically reviews consumer satisfaction with products and services, but now it wants to know about dating apps, and how satisfied customers appear to be.

We all know where this is going. Well, maybe not.

Consumer Reports found two interesting and diametrically opposed results. First, consumers hate online dating with a passion, even more than tech support services, which are notoriously poor performers. Those surveyed didn’t rate any service as more than average as far as overall satisfaction. OkCupid got the best ratings of all online dating services, including Tinder, but it got a reader score of only 56. (Tinder was second with a 52 rating.) Reader scores were evaluated by a number of factors, including messaging and search features, privacy settings, the ease of use and sign-up process, as well as quality and quantity of matches.

In 2017, it’s impossible to imagine the hunt for a partner happening without your other beloved partner: your smartphone.

Those ever-present devices are our constant companions, with us from the moment we make a connection on a dating app, to the loved-up selfies we post on Instagram, to the shocking break-up texts we forward to our friends. Technology influences every aspect of modern love lives.

Match's seventh annual ‘Singles in America’ study took a look at exactly how tech and dating overlapped in 2016, revealing a few strategies for succeeding in love in 2017.