eharmony to Develop Anti-Ghosting Chatbot

eharmony CEO Greg Langston has revealed the dating site is planning to develop a chatbot which will automatically prompt users to not ghost each other.

The new dating bot would analyze information from the users’ profiles and suggest potential topics that could revive the conversation.

For example, it might tell the ghoster to ask about their match’s favourite film, musician or another one of their listed interests.

Langston told Yahoo Finance: “I would call it like a date bot, some machine learning that helps people – actually go on a date.

“The fact is a lot of people that got married on eharmony, got married when they were 25 and now they’re 40 and they’re divorced. And they never dated much, and they don’t know how to date. It’s astounding really how many people need help. We think we can do that in an automated way.”

Ghosting is the act of cutting off communication and ending a relationship without offering an explanation.

This behaviour is mainly used in online relationships and has been widely condemned for the implications it could have on a victim’s mental health.

Dating apps have been working on new features to try and stop members from ghosting. Badoo is testing notifications which will pop-up if a message has gone unanswered for more than 72 hours.

However, The Guardian and Vice criticized these updates by suggesting that they are just engagement techniques to keep people on the apps.

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