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I've been nervously chatting to Lara on the dating platform Match.com for two minutes. She's flattered me about my age
I like her already - but Lara is not real.
She - or rather, it is a chatbot, an artificially intelligent computer program developed to communicate with people online.
The bot was launched in France in 2016, to help potential clients get Match profile for them.
It was the first to be released by a major dating site and the firm claims that 300,000 people a month complete their dating profiles with help from Lara
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Match.com
The chatbot is not a voice-controlled interface - you communicate by typing - but it can operate in 12 languages, asking users simple questions about what they are looking for.
Experts say it can also encourage people to be more honest about what they want to do.
"The profile is the big hurdle [for the industry]"says Mark Brooks, a dating sector consultant.
" People do not really want to create a profile, it's not much fun.
"But if you are having a conversation with somebody they will be more willing. And if you can create a profile from a conversation it will probably be closer to the truth. "
Match says Lara boosted registration rates by 30%, and it can now recommend matches based on user data.
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While the bot is not supposed to break the hearts, the chat is affable, friendly, informal. It asks friendly questions, you answer, and there's a short, reassuring response before the next request for information.
Try to go off script, however, and you will not get very far.
"How are you?" I asked Lara.
"Hello, hello," she replied with a winking emoticon.
"Do you have any hobbies?" (I never said I was good at chatting people up).
"I do not understand. Which gender are you?"
"Oops, your email address is invalid," she responded, with a sad face.
Perhaps we're not soulmates after all.
"[Clients]" [Clients]] [X45] lead at Match.
"We have tested Lara with no personality, Lara with jokes - and we found that having a personality can be (19459009)
more effective. "
The Match group has now also launched Julia, a similar chatbot for its over-50s dating site Our Time and Mr. De Baillenx says there are more" agents "on their way.
Perhaps one reason is that people can be notoriously rude to bots.
Microsoft's Twitter bot experiment Tay had to be disabled within a day when those who communicated with it taught it to be racist and misogynistic, and a popular Japanese app called The Boyfriend Maker was terminated when its virtual boyfriends started engaging in very lewd chat.
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Microsoft's Twitter experiment Tay developed extreme views very quickly
"I call this the 'abducted by aliens' problem," said Ludwig Konrad Bull, MD of Elixirr, speaking at the recent iDate conference in London.
"If you've ever been abducted by an alien, but for some reason, you're more likely to say that to a bot.
" If you look at how similar a robot is to the person, the more empathetic that person is towards the robot, but right before the robot seems just like a person people start really despising it. (19459009)
Mr. De Baillenx says not many of Match's customers try to do "weird things" with Lara.
But John Taylor, CEO of action.ai, believes chatbots are not yet mature enough for people to resist trying their luck - the language skills are just not there, as I discovered with Lara.
"A chatbot is about how you have a conversation with a business or a person who is not real," he says
"We want technology to talk naturally to a chatbot and be understood."
Xavier de Baillenx admits that the language of the side is not so easy.
"Reply business
In future though, a chatbot could offer a lot more to the dating space than getting you started on your search for it's a strange industry, "says Mark Brooks.
" If we do a good job we wave goodbye to our customers. "
"There's a lot of people who are not so good."
Whether people are ready to accept relationship advice from the likes of Lara to be seen.
"Maybe chatbots can be used to train people how to date. There's a lot of psychology involved, best practice. "Srini Janarthanam from Chatomate, talking at at iDate.
" And if you do not get to date anybody else, maybe you can date the chatbot. "
