Bumble to launch an AI dating assistant, ‘Bee’

Dating app maker Bumble is venturing into generative AI. During the company’s quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, Bumble introduced a new AI assistant it’s calling “Bee,” designed to become a personal matchmaker that learns users’ “values, relationship goals, communication style, lifestyle and dating intentions” through private chats. These insights are then used to help the user find more relevant matches.

Currently, Bee is in pilot phase and testing internally, founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd told investors, but it will soon be heading to beta.

With Bee, the company wants to collect a lot more information about Bumble users, as it learns more about each individual’s story and what they really want. This could set Bumble’s app apart from others like Tinder, which has also just undergone an overhaul as the dating app market has been wiped out with Gen Z users.

Bumble says users will interact with Bee in the same way they do with other AI chatbots, typing and speaking in a more conversational style.

Initially, Bee will be used to power a new dating experience called ‘Dates’, which uses AI to recommend matches; but in the future, Bumble says Bee will move into other areas, like offering date suggestions or asking for anonymous feedback on your past matches.

In ‘Dates’, Bee first learns about the user through a private introductory conversation. It then identifies two people who have shared intentions, values ​​and relationship goals. Both users receive a notification in the app with a description of why they are a great match.

The addition is part of a broader tech and AI-focused overhaul of the dating app, which has until now marketed itself as more focused on women’s needs. The company was a pioneer in areas such as the ‘women’s message first’, bans on body shaming and tools that obscured unsolicited explicit images.

Now it wants to use AI to return to user growth amid a dating market where younger users, especially Gen Z, are growing tired of swiping.

Herd even said that Bumble would experiment with removing the long-popular swipe mechanism in select markets to see how users respond. Instead of prioritizing swipes as a binary “yes” or “no,” Bumble wants to leverage other features, such as new “chapter-based” profiles where members can connect with each other about different parts of a user’s life story. This gives Bumble more data to process in its AI system and algorithms.

“We will introduce more dynamic ways for someone to show interest in your story, rather than just your profile. This will drive more dynamic engagement, better conversations and ultimately better KPIs across the board, such as engagement and opportunities to spark better conversations,” said Wolf Herde. “You’ll also see us taking a much more deliberate approach to getting people offline, rather than just into what people call dead-end chat zones.”

The company is also exploring other ways to better cater to Gen Z, a cohort that often prefers group meetings over one-on-one dates to get to know people.

The company has been working on adding AI to its app for years, making changes such as AI photo selection and feedback tools, as well as in areas such as security. Wolfe Herde told investors that Bumble’s back-end infrastructure had been overhauled because the app had infused itself with AI.

The company reported better than expected income in Q4 with gain from $224.2 million, and average revenue per paying user increased 7.9% to $22.20. The stock up about 40% on the news.