Is Viola.ai the future of dating ?
Everything is prepared Henry. Elizabeth will arrive in approximately 4 minutes and 25 seconds. I detected a 87% match for Pizza. Elizabeth likes flowers, so i ordered red roses. I estimate a 76% chance of mating after 3 consecutive dates… Enjoy, Henry.
“The World’s Most Effective A.I. Advisor and Assistant for Dating and Relationships” — Viola.ai Whitepaper
Wouldn’t it be nice, if instead of endless swiping, texting and frustrating dates an A.I. would take away our pain and find the perfect match for us? Not only that, it would also pick the perfect gifts and plans an unforgettable wedding. Gone are the days where we took confusing relationship advice from friends and family. Viola.ai is our lifelong relationship advisor, capable of helping us succeed in every aspect of our love lives?
Let’s have a look at Viola, the A.I driven Swiss army knife of dating services.
The information in this article is for informational purposes and does not constitute legal, tax or investing advice or instruction.
1. Team
At the first glance, the team of Viola.ai looks very impressive. With Violet Lim as the CEO and Co-Founder, this project has a very experienced leader within the dating industry.
In 2004 Violet Lim founded her own matchmaking company called Lunch Actually, together with her husband Jamie Lee. From then on they extended the company and acquired several other dating companies in the Asian market. Today these platforms and services are united under the roof of the Lunch Actually Group.
Viola.AI is driven by the team behind the Lunch Actually Group, although is has its own legal entity (Viola Tech Pte Ltd).
Beside her husband Jamie Lee, who leads the Business Development of Viola.ai, the project has two more Co-Founders. Zam Ong is the A.I. & Crypto Protocol Architect and former Operating Officer at eSynchrony.com Pte Ltd which also belongs to the Lunch Actually Group. Nikki Assavathorn is the founder of MeetNLunch, a dating platform in Thailand which was acquired by Lunch Actually Group in 2015.
👍 A team that consists of real people with lots of experience within the dating and matchmaking industry.
1.1 Track Record
Viola.ai claims to combine more then 50 years of experience in the dating and matchmaking industry and with the Lunch Actually Group being in the market for already 13 years. They state that “Lunch Actually is Asia’s biggest premier lunch dating company with offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Jakarta and Bangkok with the largest lunch dating membership base”.
They deem to have over 1.4 million registered members,arranging 30.1 million matches and 100,000 dates for couples.
We looked at the 4 main services the Lunch Actually Group is promoting on their website:
Dating App — LunchClick
LunchClick is the biggest one — the App tries to improve the conversions from online chatting into real-life dates. We looked on their website, ratings at the app store and social media activity. These are our findings:
Bugs on the website:
The Facebook Page looks pretty much abandoned:
The last post was made in June 2017 and a photo on the timeline promotes a single event happening in August 2016.
Lunch Actually Dating
This one offers personal consultation to the user via phone or Whatsapp in order to find a matching partner. We sent a Whatsapp message to the number above and didn’t get any response within 24 hours.
It seems that most of the other businesses beside Viola.ai are currently on hold and that the Lunch Actually team shifted their whole focus to Viola.ai.
Therefore, we ask ourselves:
Is a “BLOCKCHAIN-AI-DRIVEN MARKETPLACE FOR DATING, COURTSHIP & MARRIAGE” the missing piece of the puzzle which will lead to the greater success of the Lunch Actually Group?
👍 Lunch Actually Group runs many different services for online and offline dating.
👎 Most of their services seem to be inactive since summer 2017 and the user feedback is very critical.
1.2 Advisor-Check
We looked at 4 advisors highlighted by Viola.ai:
- Hong Ting Wong — Founder & CEO of Botbot.AI and 2359 Media
- Lisa Clampitt — Founder & President of Matchmaking Institute
- Bruno Van Ryb — Founder and former CEO of Avanques and Be Brave, a consultancy firm
- Dato Larry Gan Nyap Liou — Managing Partner at Accenture
👍 The presented advisors work in different industries all somehow related to the project.
👎 We didn’t find any statement from the advisors on LinkedIn, Twitter or other news channels about their connection to Viola.ai. Them being advisors is just mentioned on Viola.ai’s own media channels and press releases.
1.3 Institutional Investors, Business Angels and Partners
We didn’t find any information about institutional investors or business angels investing into Viola.ai. However, Viola.ai announced some partnerships with different companies.
They plan a Joint Venture Partnership with MegaX (a wide and growing retail network of more than 40,000 brands with existing 5,000,000 customers) to build an AI-Driven Worldwide Shopping Experience for the Future.
Furthermore, Viola.ai announced partnerships with FarEastFlora.com, Love Florist, Roses Only, MemeFlorist.com, Heatwave Shoes, Creative Eateries and CSK Aesthetics to offer goods and services ranging from flowers, gifts, fashion, F&B and beauty in the Asia region which will be available on Viola.AI marketplace.
We also found an announcement of partnership with Requitix — an ecommerce payment gateway solution and with the advisor Lisa Clampitt and her Matchmaking Institute.
👍 These partners might be relevant for their marketplace integration.
👎 We didn’t find any source for traditional investors. Most partners will use Viola.ai to sell their products and services which does not necessarily increase the value for the user.
2. Product and Market Size
We had an extensive look at the product description on Violas Whitepaper.
Singles and couples face numerous challenges in their journey of finding love and sustaining their relationships. Singles risk being victims of love scams due to the lack of identity verification, experience online dating fatigue and could be exploited by some unethical dating services. On the other hand, couples face difficulty in sustaining their marriages, exacerbated by uncertainty on where to seek help and which advice to follow. Many are also reluctant to share their problems due to concerns of privacy and stigma. Viola.AI is our solution for singles and couples experiencing these love and relationship challenges. […]
The scope of Viola’s proposition is huge, so we dissected the features into more digestible pieces:
- Matchmaking
This one is straightforward: Create your profile, and receive suggestions for potential dating partners. This is what all the other dating apps out there already do (including their very own LunchClick App).
- Siri for relationships
Ok, so the way it works is that instead of communicating directly with your partner/date you have an AI assistant as an intermediary. Dating apps so far are facilitating a direct communications channel once a match happens. Viola takes something that works well (Human to Human direct communication) and adds complexity. Is this something that any couple/user ever asked for?
- Amazon for “relationship” commodities
Ok so the AI assistant will recommend you places to visit (restaurant, cinema), and things to buy (flowers, wedding stuff). So this is an e-commerce business similar to what amazon does with Alexa.
- Quora/Steemit for relationship advice
When someone asks for relationship advice, users can answer and the best one gets rewarded with tokens. This reminds me of Steemit. Also r/relationships is a thing:
So these are really 4 massive products all on it’s own. I can not help but ask the question:
Can a team of 10 people pull this of in a 2 year timeframe? What about the fact, that this will be launched in multiple languages & cultures all over the world. Honestly, I think the product lacks focus. Instead of doing one thing really well, Viola.ai wants a lot of things simultaneously. Lunch Actually runs many different dating platforms, which could explain this circumstance. However, I firmly believe this is bad practice if you want to succeed as a startup.
I also wonder why the product is not presented as a solution to a problem they identified within their very own user base. Instead the Whitepaper mentions the problems in a general sense. If you claim 13 years of experience in this industry, you should know things that no one else does. What problem have you identified that you are in a unique position to solve?
Look at other successful players in the market, usually they focus on one thing where they outperform the competition.
👎 Viola.ai presents technical solutions to problems already solved by big players in the corresponding markets.
2.1 Market Size:
Viola.ai states a market size of $800 billion, consisting of dating activities (watching movies together, restaurants, holidays), education services, gifts, dating related expenses and more.
No sources for these claims are provided. They are not answering the question, what share of the market they are planning to capture and how they will do it? What region of the world are we talking about?
I highly recommend the AirBnB pitch deck for a good example on how to do it:
👎 The market size analysis is done without focussing on a country or region and does not provide sources for the data presented
2.2 Blockchain Use Case
Is there any part of the product that we couldn’t do without blockchain ?
Can we do something that all the other “centralized” dating services already out there can’t do ?
We could verify people on a centralized service, we could still hash & encrypt the profiles. We can run a marketplace very well on a centralized service. I see a point in having tokens for some kind of advice/community platform. However the case for blockchain isn’t too strong in my opinion. At the end of the day users care about good matches, and there is nothing that blockchain per se improves in this regard (The scam problem can be solved by a centralized service as well).
👎 Viola.ai tries to solve alleged problems with blockchain, that could also be solved without it.
2.3 Competition
Dating is probably one of the most valuable and competitive markets out there. Viola faces some very well performing and established products in the market like Coffee meets Bagel, Tinder and Okcupid. Also, if you are building an AI assistant, aren’t you competing with Alexa, Siri and friends? What about advice communities like Quora or Reddit? This is an obvious problem of not having a clear focus. You are competing against everyone.
It’s also noteworthy that Viola.ai will be a direct competitor towards their own line of products. There must be a reason why Facebook hasn’t launched Facebook 2 yet.
👎 We can’t identify an area where this product is 10x better (cheaper, faster, safer) than the competition.
2.4 Media Coverage and Community
Viola.ai mentions 3 times in its Whitepaper, that
“CEO Violet Lim is also an acknowledged industry expert who has been featured in more than 4000 local and regional media appearances including Bloomberg, Huffington Post, CNBC, Forbes, BBC, Channel NewsAsia and many others.”
However, Viola.ai “just” lists 30 sources for media coverage on their website and the most important ones (Forbes, BBC, CNN) only write about her — Violet Lim — not about Voila.ai. Thus, this can not count as coverage. Other sources are either press releases or payed articles.
👍 CEO Violet Lim had and has some media attention
👎 Most media coverage of Viola.ai consists of paid articles and press releases
Bounty hunt
Viola.ai conducted a huge Bounty Program (28% of their token supply), where people could participate by showing their ‘PROOF OF LOVE’. The program closed on the 9th of March.
To give you an example: The Telegram Group of Viola.ai has more than 26.000 members. If you added a member to the group you would have received 30 VIOLA tokens as a reward.
Let’s crunch some numbers: The current price of a VIOLA token is US$0.20. If we multiply this with the 30 tokens you would get for each new telegram member we are at $6.
This is a very high acquisition cost for someone joining a messaging group! And it raises the question if Viola.ai has 26.000 telegram members because they believe in the product or because they get tokens for joining? This obviously is true for every bounty program.
Last but not least let’s have a look at the community that already exists around Lunch Actually Group`s current services. Lunchclick has more than 13.000 followers on Facebook and eSync more than 70.000. As mentioned in the “Track Record” part, there are no new postings on the Lunchclick facebook page and the posts on eSync have nearly no interaction. Together with the negative feedback in the App Store, the community seems not overall satisfied with Lunch Actually Group`s current services.
👍 Lunch Actually Group services have many social media followers and 1.4 mio users (according to Viola.ai Whitepaper).
👎 On the one hand, Viola.ai spends a lot of money to acquire new followers, on the other hand it stops using existing social media channels (e.g. Facebook Lunchclick).
👎 Negative feedback of customers using Lunch Actually Group current services.
2.5 Bullshit-Bingo & Profit Promises
“Viola.AI is an ever-improving, decentralized and secured A.I. and crowd-wisdom engine that gives sound advice, useful recommendations, timely concierge service and quality matches to help singles to be effective in finding love and to help couples improve their relationships.”
- Bingo
3. Technology
3.1 Real-Id verification
One of the core value propositions of Viola is Real-Id verification — a way to exclude scammers from the service. A user uploads her photo and video-scans her face. Viola then performs a check on the user’s social media profile. Once this information is collected, a hashed version is stored on the blockchain.
Can this approach solve the problem of fakes? Here are some questions to think about:
Deepfakes
Deep Fakes are a way of video manipulation, where a person’s face is morphed onto someone else’s in a video. Putting celebrities faces onto porn actors has become so popular that r/deepfakes reached over 50.000 subscribers, and was eventually banned by reddit.
There is also a software called fake app, that allows anyone to create their own deepfakes:
Face-Id
Even with dedicated hardware and billions in R&D, people still having issues with Apple’s face-id system. A lot of users are complaining about the feature not working properly:
Can Viola pull this off in a reliable way, with users having different devices and camera resolutions? There is also the question why they are not just using a standard KYC process with a simple id verification (which they also will use during the Token Sale).
👎 Viola.ai never mentioned scammers being a serious problem they faced within services of the Lunch Actually Group.
👎 It is questionable if Viola’s Real-Id verification approach is the best solution to the alleged problem.
3.2 The A.I Engine
AI is the big buzzword besides blockchain in tech these days. But what does it actually mean for Viola in a very practical sense?
By combining natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis, we will be able to understand users’ feelings and perspectives better, and therefore provide suitable actions.
NLP is a discipline of computer science that is concerned with understanding human language. Viola.ai claims that they combine NLP with sentiment analysis to “ […] be able to find out the mood of your partner so that the user can be notified of any current emotional concern.”. Ok, so first of all sentiment analysis is a sub discipline of NLP, so you can’t “combine” it.
Also, is AI at a point where it is able to read human emotions, and actually understand interpersonal relationships?
Why is it that neither Siri, Google Assistant nor Alexa are unable to read any kind of emotions or subversive thoughts, even though millions of users are talking to them on a daily basis?
It’s simply that currently no AI exists that is capable of reading humans on a deep emotional level. Period. There are approaches, but we are just not there yet. Add to it the fact that the “Algorithms” described in the Whitepaper are generic NLP stuff, nothing that isn’t out there for years already.
Why isn’t Viola at least using a state of the art API like IBM Watson for these things? Why try to reinvent this, especially with a small team?
Also keep in mind that systems like Watson really struggle to work in different languages besides English. Viola wants to launch in 11 different countries in its first two years.
How do you gather that data? Are couples supposed to communicate exclusively over the Viola app?
👎 It is questionable if Viola can deliver a superior AI technology outperforming existing solutions.
3.3 Github repository
The Smart Contract for the crowd sale & ERC20 token is publicly visible on Violas GitHub repository.
The repo is maintained by 4 contributors and shows 152 commits to this day. Besides the standard ERC20/Crowd Sale stuff, nothing is visible of any superior technology claimed in the Whitepaper (AI, Marketplace, Hedged Escrow).
3.4 Etherscan
No visible information on Etherscan.io.
3.5 Security Audit
A security audit has been performed by SmartDec. Several security vulnerabilities have been found, and fixed by the developer.
3.6 Demo
There is nothing to test besides mockups on the website + Whitepaper.
4. Token Sale Information
4.1 Usage of funds
👍 Viola.ai shows how they will use their raised funds and goes into more detail in the Whitepaper.
4.2 Token Distribution
👍 Viola.ai shows their Token Distribution and goes into more detail in the Whitepaper.
👎 The share of 28% of the tokens going into the Rewards & Bounty program is extremely high and for us not a sign of a convincing product, since it pays people to talk positively about Violo.ai.
4.3 Vesting
Viola.ai states in the Whitepaper, that
“all team members will be vested in the Company for a total of 2 years with 30% of the tokens vested till the 1st Year and the rest of the 70% tokens vested till the 2nd Year.”
Standard vesting clauses typically last four years and have a one year “cliff”, meaning if one of the founders leaves the company before the 12th month, then he or she walks away with nothing.
👍 The Viola.ai team is vested.
👎 Compared to standard vesting clauses the vesting period is too short.
4.4 Escrow
Viola.ai states in the Whitepaper:
“The soft cap we need to power this project forward is US$1 million, while the hard cap is US$12.5 million.”
Furthermore:
“All the funds from the Token Sale shall be held in Escrow till the end of the Token Sale success or failure. If we are unable to sell at least US$1 million of tokens in all, we will make full refund to purchasers.”
👍 Viola.ai keeps the funds in an escrow until the Token Sale is completed.
👍 Viola.ai will do a refund to all buyers, if they do not reach the soft cap.
4.5 KYC — Know your customer
Viola.ai states in the Whitepaper that
“All purchases must complete their KYC process for the purchase to be legitimate”
Furthermore, they address in the Terms of Service that they conduct next to the Know Your Customer (KYC) an annual Anti-Money Laundering (AML) audit of Viola.AI’s operations
👍 Viola.ai stats that they conduct a KYC process for each token buyer.
👍 Viola.ai stats that they conduct an annual Anti-Money Laundering (AML) audit.
5. Paper Jungle
5.1 Whitepaper
Vioal.ai provides a 45 pages long Whitepaper. It contains information about many important aspects regarding their project. However, we are also missing a few things:
👍 Viola.ai provides many important information about the team, token sale, product, roadmap, technology.
👎 I couldn’t explain my mom in three sentences what it is, and why it has value?
👎 They didn’t manage to show the core value in one simple graphic.
👎 Viola.ai does not give any reference sources for the data they provide (e.g. market size, percentage of scam accounts etc.).
👎 They also don’t refer to any data they collected within Lunch Actually Group, whereas this would make most sense to us since they call themselves “industry experts”.
5.2 Terms and Conditions
Viola.ai provides a Terms and Conditions document (they call it Terms of Service). They also refer to the Terms of Service document in the Whitepaper.
Viola.ai provides its legal entity (Viola Tech Pte Ltd, located at 51 Cuppage Road, #10–07, Singapore 229469) as well as its company registration number (201731618G).
👍 Viola.ai provides a Terms and Conditions document including its legal entity.
5.3 Privacy Policy
👍 Viola.ai provides a Privacy Policy where they explain how they will collect, use, share and protect any personal information of a user.
5.4 Terms of Use
👎 Viola.ai does not provide a Terms of Use document
6. Conclusion
Solving the problems of both singles and couples with an ever evolving AI is a bold claim. The solid industry expertise of the team is overshadowed by bad ratings of their previous apps, and deserted social media channels. The team wants to launch an all fits one solution, that is tremendous in scope and lacks focus while not clearly pointing out that this solution has evolved from problems their current users are actually facing. On top of that, dating is a crowded market and there is a well established line of competitors.
We are missing a point where the solution clearly outcompetes its rivals. The small team is vested only for two years, which is too short especially given the massive scope of the project. The fact that Viola checked the usual ICO Rating checkboxes (Github, Security Audits, Whitepaper, KYC) cannot change the fact, that there are flaws within it’s core.
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