Story - Voice Dating

STORY: DATE LIKE YOU LISTEN TO MUSIC

Have you ever shown up to a first date and realised in the first 30 seconds you listen to them that they are not for you?

Story is a dating app that lets you listen to potential matches before committing to the first date.

Story lets you date from your lockscreen. Audio answers and the album cover (the first photo) for each match appears on your lockscreen, meaning you can be dating while you cook, run, workout, clean, drive, or even work for your day job, using your airpods, CarPlay, or HomePod. Instead of listening to podcasts of people you will never meet, why not listen to mini podcasts of potential matches who could become future relationships?

WHY VOICE WORKS: AUTHENTICITY

Dating apps /sites geared toward more serious relationships makes bold claims of authenticity. Then these dating apps show screens full of photos, videos, or worse, some list of questions to ‘find your match’ for better relationships.

As a society, we know how we ‘should’ look and how to get there in 2 taps (thanks FaceTune), we know how we ‘should’ answer in text (ironic, brief, carefree). And it’s only natural that on dating apps you want to present your best, most curated self to attract the maximum number of matches.

But how should your voice sound to be ‘attractive’ to a potential match? Should your voice be slow or fast? Quiet or loud? Should you speak for a long time or short time? …

The truth is that different people enjoyed different voices and different styles of answers. Voice is hard to curate or edit convincingly, forcing people to show their authentic self to potential matches. Even if you were a top actor, you would not know what voice or answer to use as there is no universal best answer that will make everyone want relationships with you. It’s that old truism: If you are both yourselves from the start, it’s easier to tell if you’re right for each other in the long run.

Folks are so aware of how transparent, how raw, this form of communication is that the hardest part of Story is ‘getting their courage up’ to hit the record button. But because of this transparency, what Story captures in 4x short audio recordings is so much more powerful than 100x text answers. In the long run this helps you find better matches that could actually become relationships. When you listen to a potential match, you feel like you’ve met them before the first date.