No swiping involved: the AI dating apps promising to find your soulmate

Dating apps exploit you, dating profiles lie to you, and sex is basically something old people used to do.

You might as well consider it: can AI help you find love?

For a handful of tech entrepreneurs and a few brave Londoners, the answer is “maybe”.

No, this is not a story about humans falling in love with sexy computer voices – and strictly speaking, AI dating of some variety has been around for a while.

Most big platforms have integrated machine learning and some AI features into their offerings over the past few years.

But dreams of a robot-powered future – or perhaps just general dating malaise and a mounting loneliness crisis – have fuelled a new crop of startups that aim to use the possibilities of the technology differently.

Jasmine, 28, was single for three years when she downloaded the AI-powered dating app Fate.

With popular dating apps such as Hinge and Tinder, things were “repetitive”, she said: the same conversations over and over. “I thought, why not sign up, try something different?

It sounded quite cool using, you know, agentic AI, which is where the world is going now, isn’t it?” Fate, a London startup that went live last May, bills itself as the first “agentic AI dating app”.

Its core offering is an AI personality named Fate that “onboards” users during an interview, asking them about their hopes and struggles before putting forward five potential matches – no swiping involved.

Fate will also coach users through their interactions, if they desire, a functionality Jasmine described as helpful and another user said was “scary” and “a bit like Black Mirror’.

Rakesh Naidu, Fate’s founder, demonstrated its coaching ability in an interview with the Guardian. “I just feel a bit hopeless at the moment in regards to my chats.

I feel like I’m not being engaging enough or meaningful enough,” he said into his phone. “I just need some kind of meaningful questions I can ask to really uncover the essence of people.” “I hear you, Rakesh,” said a synthetic female voice. “Here are a few ideas.

One, what’s something you’re passionate about that not many people know?” Naidu, 28, said he started Fate in order to address shortcomings in the world’s biggest dating platforms – apps such as Tinder, Bumble and Hinge, which monetise the time users spend on them and “are literally profiting off keeping people lonely”.

Other startups, from Sitch to Keeper, have launched across the US, hoping AI features can provide the novelty to win them a share of a crowded market.

Sitch leverages the power of AI to manage vasts amounts of information, inviting users to “give us detailed feedback down to the hair colour, where they want to raise a family, and their fav music”; Keeper says it can find “a match with rare and real soulmate potential”.

Part of the issue, Naidu says, are algorithmic approaches to matchmaking: Tinder at one point ranked users’ desirability through an Elo score, an algorithm originally used to rate chess players.

On dating platforms, it’s a Hobbesian proposition – high-scoring users are shown to other high-scoring users, low-scoring users to other low-scoring users. “It’s very superficial,” said Naidu.