“What if my date ghosts me?” “What if they don’t look anything like their picture?” “What if my hands are sweaty AF?”
Have you ever asked one of your friends any of these questions ahead of an important date? What if your friends are not available this Valentine’s Day, enjoying their own romantic ventures oblivious of those vital questions niggling away at the back of your mind?
Fear not, in this age of modern dating, fuelled by Tinder and DMs, Amazon’s Alexa is here to be your wingman this Valentine’s Day. The future of dating has moved from apps to voice.
With the busiest time for online dating being from the day after to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, earlier this year saw Match.com launch a new skill for Amazon’s Alexa which can provide the answers to all your pre-date qualms. Providing humorous and cheeky answers, the digital assistant spouts out information gathered from the largest survey of singles ever conducted, Match’s Singles in America study.
Creating a skill for Alexa essentially means uploading information to the cloud from which the device draws its information and, as explained in last week’s blog post, the brands who are getting there first are the real winners.
Match.com is not the only romantic brand to broaden their offerings to include Alexa’s support: EHarmony has created a skill that actually allows users to find themselves a date without even lifting their finger. Linking your online account and Three Day Rule’s skill provides single users with daily dating motivation and tips, to get people out of their comfort zone and away from habits that could be negatively impacting their dating game.
The future of modern dating remains topical after Black Mirror episode ‘Hang the DJ’ left everyone feeling uncertain about leaving our romantic fates down to technology and now we’re leaving our dating advice and potential future partner in the hands of a robot…
This leads us to consider the future of advice, not just for modern day singletons’ misgivings, but also to wider queries we may ask our friends for: should I visit a doctor? Where would you recommend I book my summer holiday this year? Does this dress suit me? Based on this, brands are faced with a number of opportunities to become a key source of trusted information when it comes to answering these questions and giving advice, at the sound of a word, by developing new skills for Alexa and other digital assistant technology.