Technology

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. A dating app is teaming up with a voice-activated digital assistant to help tech-savvy singles find love hands-free.

Earlier this month, eHarmony announced a partnership with Amazon to bring a branded skill to Alexa. Enabling it allows eHarmony users to hear their matches and messages by voice, ask for more details about their dating prospects, and have photos of their connections sent to their smartphones.

This time around, it’s not eHarmony or Alexa that’s in the news. Plenty Of Fish has announced an integration with the Google Assistant on Google Home, as well as eligible Android and iOS phones. Same premise, different devices.

eHarmony New Skill for Amazons Alexa

There’s no shortage of apps and websites to help lonely hearts find love, but there’s only one voice-activated digital assistant playing matchmaker for tech-savvy singles.

Amazon is teaming up with online dating platform eHarmony to launch a new skill for its AI-equipped, hands-free Alexa speaker. eHarmony users who enable the skill will be able to hear their matches and messages by voice, and ask Alexa for more details about their dating prospects.

The ability to access eHarmony matches through Alexa is the latest move by eHarmony to make it easier for people to connect and date in a fast paced world. "Alexa provides a unique, human element to eHarmony," said Grant Langston, chief executive officer of eHarmony, in a statement. "The eHarmony skill for Alexa advises singles on matches who are compatible and sent messages. The eHarmony skill for Alexa also surfaces pertinent information, like location and occupation that some people might gloss over if they are just quickly swiping at attractive pictures. With the eHarmony skill for Alexa, people can focus more on the other elements of a profile by listening to her."

Badoo Look A Like

Ever downloaded Tinder or Bumble in the hopes of meeting someone who looked like Ryan Gosling or Chris Pratt? Well, look no further – dating app Badoo has launched its new Lookalikes feature to help you out.

The app provides a list of various celebrities for users to choose from (think Beyonce, Kim Kardashian, Jessica Alba, Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, and even Donald Trump). When you click on that celebrity’s photo, a list of choices with profile pictures of your matches appears.

The app uses facial recognition technology to scour their database of 350 million daters to deliver the results. The matches aren’t exactly spitting images, but there are certain features that they and their celebrity counterparts have in common to consider them a lookalike. (Although I question a 40-something Jennifer Lawrence, for instance).

How many trends and buzzwords can you fit into a single business idea? Matchpool may have set a new record.

The company is a dating platform that describes itself as “a decentralized matchmaking protocol which uses group dynamics to help participants match with each other.” Others simply call it “Slack Meets Tinder.”

Matchpool raised over $5.7 million in 48 hours in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), a crowdfunding mechanism modeled after the Initial Public Offering (IPO) process of conventional companies. And in keeping with that high-tech theme, Matchpool’s most successful users earn cryptocurrency rewards for their matchmaking efforts.

Video is in. After the explosive success of Snapchat, competitor social networks scrambled to launch Stories features of their own. Instagram’s copycat proved so popular that Instagram Stories usage surpassed all Snapchat activity in April 2017.

Yet despite the success stories, online dating remains mysteriously absent from that race to innovate. On the surface, the search for love seems like an ideal candidate for video - if a picture on a profile is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth several times that - but few dating services have dared incorporate video into their features.

Hinge and Lively hope to be at the forefront of the eventual, seemingly inevitable, push to make video a regular part of the digital dating experience. Lively, a video-based social app, recently announced the release of augmented live video chat, while Hinge debuted a feature to add video clips to profiles.

Augmented reality: not just for Pokemon anymore.

AR has long been a holy grail of the tech world. Everyone wants to do it, but almost no one is doing it well. The explosive popularity of Pokemon Go proved commercially successful AR is finally within reach, and if there’s any industry other than gaming that seems perfect for this futuristic tech, it’s dating.

A Los Angeles company announced in June that it plans to launch the world’s first augmented reality dating app later this year. Called FlirtAR, the app will use a range of innovative solutions to identify nearby daters, measure compatibility, and make matches with just a point of your smartphone.

"FlirtAR will use facial recognition, geolocation, and augmented reality to show user dating profiles and begin conversations with potential dates in the real world and in real time," said founder Renan Godinho.