With the rise of online dating, singles have become used to dealing with the process of rejecting potential partners they don’t want to date.
A new tool called Ghostbot wants to help with this, by taking over the awkward end of a text conversation.
The service, created by Burner, detects incoming messages from numbers its users are trying to avoid and generates short, simple replies to cut the conversation off.
Burner even claims Ghostbot can determine what the other person’s intentions are, saying the platform “learns from experience. For instance, Ghostbot can determine when a text is a “let’s do something” invitation, a “booty call”, a pick-up line, a proclamation, or a lewd comment, among others.”
For example, if the suitor is suggesting a date, Ghostbot will reply on the user’s behalf, saying something like: “I just have no time right now,” or “Sorry, just me and [pizza emoji] tonight.”
The app was created by temporary phone number generator, Burner, a service that lets people give out temporary numbers, rather than their personal one, to protect themselves and their identity.
Speaking about the tool, its founders said: “Texting is a fun, convenient, and regular part of dating culture these days.
“But we’ve heard from many of our users – and we know from public conversation and the surging popularity of social media communities – that unwanted, aggressive, and even sexually harassing texts are a real and growing problem.”
The developers of Burner teamed up with bot creator Voxable and screenwriter Peter Miriani to create the app.
Burner sees Ghostbot as an example of the kind of bots it wants to release over the coming years, saying:
“Ghostbot is an example of what kinds of things are in store for our users in the future. The tools we’ve built into our platform make the phone number smarter in ways that traditional carriers can’t (and won’t).
“Best of all, anyone can build “bot” or agent-style applications that sit on top of Burner lines using the incoming and outgoing webhooks we built into Burner Connections.”
Ghostbot is built on Burner and is available to the app’s entire user base for free.