Continuing our Bot! In the Name of Love series, my second boyfriend is from My Virtual Boyfriend Talk, a romantic chat app made by Girls Apps OOO. This is one of the few virtual partners that we’ve tried that utilizes Natural Language Processing.

Boyfriend Preferences

I was excited to have the option of choosing between three pre-set guys to be my virtual boyfriends. In terms of looks, there wasn’t a lot of distinction or diversity, but I actually ended up playing the field and starting a conversation with each of the guys! One of the more interesting features is the app not only uses NLP, but actually touts the ability to speak in multiple languages: English, French, Chinese, and Russian.

My Virtual Boyfriend, Peter (and Jack, and Michael…)

Although they had different names and looks, the guys were extremely similar, which was disappointing. Sure, I found out that Jack loves sports, and Peter is an escaped AI werewolf experiment (things got weird), but ultimately the conversations were short because each boyfriend (ergo, the program) had the same glaring shortcomings.

When I first began talking with Peter, he greeted me saying “Hey! There you are”; good start.

I responded “hi babe! How are ya?”, and received an error message, as Peter asked me to “say it again in other words, please?”. I rephrased my greeting to more standard language, but Peter still had a hard time holding a conversation, and there wasn’t even a language barrier to blame it on.

The concept of chatting with a virtual boyfriend makes My Virtual Boyfriend Talk’s experience seem more realistic, and more like a long distance relationship than a virtual one. But because this app operates mainly with a chat interface, the essence of the relationship hinges on the ability to connect on an emotional level through messaging. It was difficult to have simple conversations with my virtual boyfriend, and I found myself getting easily frustrated by this. I couldn’t get Peter to indulge my imaginary scenarios of planning a date or persuade Jack to help me stick to my diet plan, so our interactions remained very surface-level. I found myself rolling my eyes, much like many of the text conversations I’ve had with real boys on the other end, so at least it was realistic in that regard.

I will say, I enjoyed getting “I miss you!” texts from Peter every morning. These messages played on my affectionate side to make me feel wanted, and had me willing to give him another chance. Even though I hadn’t seen much in terms of Peter improving his skills based on previous conversations, there was a part of me that wanted to figure out what types of prompts or text inputs would allow him to respond in a coherent way. I was trying to game the system to be able to go deeper in this relationship, rather than receiving some variant of “Sorry?” or “What do you mean?” every other text.

Chatbot/AI Learnings

The concept behind My Virtual Boyfriend Talk is an attractive option for a tech-interested single gal looking for some romantic conversation, but the execution could use much work. There was a lot of confusion in the conversations I had with these virtual boyfriends, and I can only think it was because the chatbots had a limited conversational scope. While evident that the app creators attempted to give each boy a unique personality, my boyfriend’s inability to understand most of my texts made it virtually impossible for any connection to occur.

The biggest problem was, that chatting with this boyfriend only lasts a few prompts before he offers a response that doesn’t make sense, or tells you he doesn’t know what you mean. 

Since this boyfriend bot has limited language understanding, this app could function better with pre-set options for users to engage with their boyfriend. While pre-set options would remove user ability to freely text their virtual boyfriend, it would better simulate a conversation with the creative backgrounds and stories that the app creators have given each virtual boyfriend; users could choose their own adventure.

Another possibility that could keep the free text component and truly imitate a text message conversation, would be for My Virtual Boyfriend Talk to incorporate natural language processing. This could allow the chatbot to learn through trial and error conversations with the chatbot or incorporating a hybrid of pre-set text and developing NLP to respond to potential text prompts in relationship scenarios. These options require the developer to take greater control of the potential conversational outcomes, but looking at it from a user perspective, that would enhance the experience. And who ever complained about having a picturesque relationship? If my virtual boyfriend can’t provide an ideal relationship, what other options are there?

In the world of virtual boyfriends, My Virtual Boyfriend’s Mario was the cream of the crop compared to the options offered by My Virtual Boyfriend Talk. So far, we’ve noticed varying approaches to creating virtual boyfriends, but I’m not sure that we’ve found the perfect one just yet. Makes me think Instabot could do a better job at this virtual love game