Technology

Office romance? What could go wrong? Dating co-workers is a notoriously risky proposition, and yet, one dating app thought playing cupid in the workplace could be its next big move.

Feeld, a service originally created for threesomes, made the bold decision to launch ‘Feeld for Slack’ - a bot designed to allow employees to share their office crushes in the popular team messaging platform.

To be used, a designated administrator at a company has to install the app. Once it's downloaded, anyone on the Slack team can direct message @Feeld and enter the name of their crush. If the feeling is mutual, both people receive a notification. If not, no one is ever the wiser.

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.

As we close out the first quarter of 2017, Happn has big plans to drive growth during the remainder of the year.

CEO Didier Rappaport told Business Insider that the company is working on a “new business model” that adds subscriptions to the service. Though the subscription model is still being tested, the tentative plan is to remove the ads (which currently fund the company) for users with paid accounts.

Since launching three years ago, Happn has built a user base of 25 million people. However, the company has yet to become profitable, and that’s its chief goal for 2017.

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.

If anyone can make bold predictions about the future of online dating, it’s industry game-changer and Tinder CEO Sean Rad. This month at the StartUp Grind Global Conference in California, he shared that dating apps could soon be using augmented reality technology to help users meet.

He explained that the technology would help people meet in real time, and work similarly to Pokemon Go. For instance, if you walk down the street and point your smartphone at someone you find attractive, you can find out immediately whether or not they are single. And if you are single and dating, you could also send virtual signals to someone you pass, letting them know you’re interested. This could work through technology like Google Glass as well as your phone.

It seems many dating apps now want to distance themselves from Tinder, even though the tremendous growth of online dating was thanks to Tinder’s swiping technology. Now, instead of endless swiping that goes nowhere, a common complaint among Tinder users, a new app is offering something more intimate: requiring a phone call to connect with a match.

Dating app Hotline launched in New York last month, and is already getting some buzz thanks to its old-school premise: talking on the phone. The app doesn’t let you text until you’ve made at least one phone call and talked to your match first.