AI dating just levelled up. A dating tool using artificial intelligence (AI) to measure how daters really feel about their date could be on the market soon. You could soon know, in real time, if you have given your date “the ick.”
The AI can tell you if your date isn’t loving it by monitoring the conversation that’s going down and tracking their physiological reactions.
Engineering students at the University of Cincinnati are currently working on the development, training software to read data from wearable technology that keeps track of heart rates, respiration and perspiration while two people held a conversation.
AI dating and physiological synchrony
Researches examined the physiological response of people’s autonomic nervous system — the control centre of the human body you don’t need to think about, like your heartbeat, breathing, digestion and other automatic functions. When two people’s heart rates and breathing sync up, this “body pairing” is called physiological synchrony. The phenomenon is strongest when two people are deeply engaged in a conversation, or can often occur when working on tasks together and cooperating.
Vesna Novak, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Cincinnati, shared that “physiological synchrony shows up even when people are talking over Zoom.”
The experiments
In an experiment with students at the university, the AI was able to accurately distinguish — with a 75% success rate — four different types of conversation scenarios that happened, including a positive conversation about a topic in which they shared a popular opinion, a negative conversation over a topic they disagree on, and two conversations about an agreed-upon topic where both participants took turns leading the discussion.
The study, published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, is the first of its kind to train AI on learning the internal human response to a conversation based on physiology alone.
Lead author Iman Chatterjee shared that the study could provide some welcome evidence and feedback about yourself or the person you’re dating.
“The computer could tell if you’re a bore. A modified version of our system could measure the level of interest a person is taking in the conversation, how compatible the two of you are, and how engaged the other person is in the conversation.”
Chatterjee thinks that physiological synchrony could be an evolutionary adaptation. “Humans evolved to share and collaborate with each other, which manifests even at a subconscious level,” he shared. “We only notice physiological synchrony when we measure it, but it probably creates a better level of coordination.”
So if you really want to know what your date is thinking, you could soon get the answers. Imagine all those awkward conversations you get to avoid the next day!
