Sean Rad Imagines AI & AR-Powered Online Dating Future

Sean Rad has been giving his thoughts on how AI and AR could intersect with online dating in the coming years.

Speaking at the Start-Up Grind conference this week, and on The Forbes Interview podcast, the Tinder co-founder laid out a vision of what an AI-assisted online dating world might look like.

In a chat with Steven Bertoni, who has interviewed Rad a number of times, the Tinder founder said: “We are going to move towards a world where I open an app where I talk to my device and I get an answer. I ask a question and I get an answer. I don’t do a lot of work, I don’t navigate too much. I’m not given too many options.

“That’s going to be fuelled by AR, in particular, and I think AI is going to help make a world where you’re sort of spending less time being inundated with sort of content and noise and more time sort of focusing on quality and the answers

“So imagine you open Tinder one day and, you know, the Tinder assistant says: “You know, Sean, there’s a beautiful girl, someone that you’re going to find very attractive down the street.

“You have a lot of things in common and your common friend is Justin and you’re both free Thursday night and there’s this great concert that you both want to go to and can I set up a date? And here is a little bit more info about her.”

Artificial intelligence is being touted as likely integral to the future of online dating, as dating brands begin to experiment with things like chatbots and personal assistant tools.

In his talk at the GDI Conference in London last October, TechCrunch Editor-At-Large Mike Butcher argued that AI will completely transform online dating, and will be “better at matching each other than we are ourselves”, quoting Montreal Institute for Learning research that was able to predict attraction on Tinder with 68% accuracy using AI.

In another interview, this time at the Start-Up Grind Conference, Sean Rad spoke about how another form of tech – Augmented Reality – could even be used to recognise people’s availability, almost like “traffic light parties” popular at universities and colleges.

Rad said: “That will definitely impact dating. You can imagine how, with augmented reality, that experience could happen in the room, in real time. The impact is profound as these devices get closer to your senses, to your eyes, to your experiences.”

Read more about Rad’s Start-Up Grind appearance here, and listen to the Forbes podcast here.