As he sat down across from me, my patient had a rueful expression on his face. "I had a date," he announced. For years, he'd shared tales of romantic hopes dashed. But before I could ask him what went wrong, he continued, "So I asked a chatbot what I should do." Simulations of human conversation powered by artificial intelligence--chatbots--have been much in the news, but I'd never had a patient tell me they'd actually used one for advice before.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can diagnose illnesses, fight parking tickets, and now, AI is being to find humans love. Dating app Hinge is currently testing a virtual assistant called'Audrey' that will act as the user's wing woman – it talks to their matches and sets up a date. The technology is currently in beta, but Hinge is said to offer the service for $99 a month in bid to'say goodbye to matching, messaging and scheduling'. Dating app Hinge is currently testing a virtual assistant called'Audrey' that will act as the user's wing woman – it talks to their matches and sets up a date. Audrey was designed to chat with a users matches and setup a date between the two.

When people have love troubles they tend to go to their family or closest friends for advice, or in some cases approach a professional. But they could soon have another option to choose from. A Japanese technology company, NTT Resonant, is inventing a robot designed to dish out love advice. A Japanese technology company, NTT Resonant, is hoping to help by inventing a robot designed to dish out love advice. The system, called Oshi-el, can show sympathy, suggest a solution to the problem and add a comment of encouragement.

A Japanese tech company has trained an AI to give love advice to troubled hearts. NTT Resonant, which operates the Goo web portal and search engine, created a system called Oshi-el to answer people's relationship questions, like a virtual agony aunt. The researchers chose to focus on this genre of query as "non-factoid" questions are difficult for AI to address. "Most chatbots today are only able to give you very short answers, and mainly just for factual questions," says Makoto Nakatsuji at NTT Resonant. "Questions about love, especially in Japan, can often be a page long and complicated. They include a lot of context like family or school, which makes it hard to generate long and satisfying answers."