Technology

Renate Nyborg, former CEO of Tinder, is launching new AI-based app Meeno to help people combat loneliness and guide them in their relationships.

According to Euro News, Meeno isn’t a dating app – instead, it acts as a “personal mentor” for navigating relationships. It operates differently from a virtual girlfriend (or boyfriend), therapist, or coach, according to Nyborg. Instead of finding you a date, it will help guide you in understanding relationships, so you can feel more comfortable interacting and connecting in real life.

Nyborg told Euro News that the young people who originally built swipe-based dating apps like Tinder are now moving to build apps that help you return to “real-life connection,” because they find the dating app experience lacking. Recent studies have also pointed to a rise in loneliness since the pandemic, where people were mostly socializing over screens.

Several China-based dating apps have added location trackers as a premium feature to boost revenues, but it’s also boosting suspicions among users.

According to South China Morning Post, some of these features include real-time location tracking, daily check-ins with partners, and allowing your partner to check your phone usage. In theory, the idea is to increase transparency and build closer connections between partners, but in reality, the features are causing more tension between them.

Understandably, this trend has sparked controversy, especially among those who already have partners who are suspicious of their behavior. The features can be quite intrusive, including a subscription that allows mutual sharing of smartphone usage time, battery level, network status and screen unlock history. It is not clear how knowledge of these particular features contributes to improved relationships. In fact, they seem to be exacerbating existing problems in relationships.

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, will be expanded to include a dating app feature.

According to Fox Business, Musk recently held a company-wide meeting on the anniversary of his acquisition of Twitter to announce where he sees the platform headed. At the meeting, employees report that he said that X will become a “fully fledged” dating app in 2024, according to Business Insider.

At the meeting, he also mentioned that banking and transaction features will be added to the app in the near future, referring to these two major moves as being part of the new “everything app” he envisions for X.

Cybersecurity company Avast has pointed to a popular AI tool that is helping scammers build better fake dating profiles and manipulate unsuspecting dating app users.

Nicknamed LoveGPT, the software has been around a while, but now its capabilities are stronger since it has incorporated AI into its tool. Now, LoveGPT can create more believable and better crafted profiles to trap users into interacting with them, not realizing they are chatting with a bot. This makes it easier to lure them into a scam.

According to website Decrypt, Avast claims that LoveGPT can create fake profiles on at least 13 different dating sites while it scrapes user photos, messages, profile bios, and other data. (It stores the scraped data in multiple databases.) The tool then separates users into different demographic categories, such as age, to better target victims and create more realistic profiles.

Match Group announced in its quarterly earnings call that its star app Tinder will be launching a “high-end” subscription tier this fall. In addition, Tinder will debut a product refresh to cater to the Gen Z dating market.

The company has been testing price points in different markets, including a $500 subscription that was called Tinder Vault, according to CPO Mark Van Ryswyk. In an interview with Fast Company earlier this year, he noted that there’s a market for daters who are willing to pay for good matches, as evidenced by the success of its exclusive dating app The League.

However, the price point was arguably high for an app that will not include human matchmakers, but instead will continue to rely on technology to serve up better matches.

Parents in China are taking matters into their own hands with their single adult children and using dating apps to help them find someone to marry.

Parent-facing dating apps are taking off in China, according to Rest of World, which reports on tech trends globally. Many parents are using online matchmaking platforms like Perfect In-Laws, Family-Building Matchmaking, and Parents Matchmaking to set up dates for their grown and unmarried children.

On platforms like these, the parents set up profiles for their children, sometimes without their knowledge or consent, according to Rest of World. When the match is made, it’s the parents who meet and get to know each other first, similar to matchmaking apps used in India.