Meet The Team: Q&A With CEO & Founder of Viola.AI — Violet Lim

CEO & Co-Founder of Viola.AI, Violet Lim is a passionate entrepreneur and expert matchmaker who has been running her dating company, Lunch Actually Group since 2004. Violet is a Certified Matchmaker, Best-selling Author, Relationship Columnist and Media Darling who has been featured in over 4,000 media globally.

Viola.AI is her latest baby — one that would disrupt the dating and relationship industry as we know it. Get to know her in this Q&A!

Hi Violet, can you give us a little bit of information about yourself and how did you end up being in the dating industry?

Violet: Like most people out there, my childhood dream is NOT to be a matchmaker. Far from it really. Like most Asian children, I was groomed by my parents to study hard, get a good job and go to a good university which was what I did being the obedient daughter. :) I read Law at University of Manchester and subsequently, I did my Masters in Personnel Management at the London School of Economics. However, during my summer attachments at a law firm, I discovered that as much as I love law, it was not my calling. My first job was with Citigroup Singapore as a Management Associate, and that was where I first got the inspiration of starting a dating agency, as I had so many single colleagues.

As a MA (Management Associate) at Citigroup, I get to work in many different departments and met many people. I observed that many of my colleagues were single and not dating. That was rather puzzling for me as they were attractive and eligible people. I soon realised that it is because they were working really long hours, they were virtually married to the bank. When I came across the concept of lunch dating, I was immediately attracted to the idea because I felt that lunch was ‘short, sweet and simple’ — it is long enough for you to get to know someone, yet it was not too long that it would become awkward. Having always been passionate about helping people, I decided to quit my job at the bank and start a new career as a modern-day matchmaker, where the business is not just about making money, but helping to make a difference in people’s lives by helping them find their life-long happiness.

So how did that collide with Blockchain and how you ended up with this idea to develop Viola.AI?

V: Viola.AI is a project that has been in the making for the last 2 years based on our 10+ years of industry experience. With the advancement of AI and blockchain technology, we are excited that we can now bring to life what we have been envisioning all this while!

We believe that blockchain technology is the future. Some of the features of our platform is not possible without using the blockchain technology. And we see blockchain technology being the game changer in combating some of the problems that have been plaguing the dating industry for years.

For example, we employ the blockchain as part of our Real-ID Verification process to assure users that all profiles in Viola.AI are real (there will never be fake accounts, scammers or bots that some rogue dating services resort to). Blockchain decentralizes and protects that verification process and gives users even more assurance and knowledge that no one can tamper with the results, which would make the Viola.AI protected against hackers.

In order to make Viola.AI the smartest dating & relationship AI, it is important that we are able to train our AI capabilities via the community contributions other than tapping on our millions of data points from our 13-years in industry.

You’re on a mission to disrupt the dating and relationship industry. Can you describe what’s the current issues with today’s dating and relationship industry, and why does it need something like Viola.AI to come along? What are you trying to achieve ultimately?

V: After being in this industry for the past 13 years, we’ve seen firsthand the challenges that our singles face. Not just that, the challenge doesn’t stop as soon as our singles get attached.

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.

We realize that there is no dating service at the moment that can tackle all these problems seamlessly.

Viola.AI is our solution for singles and couples experiencing these love and relationship challenges. She will be the most powerful and the only dating and relationship adviser that you need.

We believe Viola.AI will revolutionize and disrupt the world’s dating and relationship industry as it can successfully address and resolve the pain points and challenges that singles and couples are facing today.

And through the deployment of decentralized system and blockchain technology enables high security and authentication of users. This powerful tool can prevent any identity theft, protect against data tampering and protect the infrastructure of Viola.AI.

Viola.AI harnesses on the latest technology in artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and trustless smart contracts to develop a powerful lifelong relationship advisor named Viola and an AI-driven marketplace to create and sustain successful and happy relationships for all singles and couples.

Viola.AI is designed to help achieve the following objectives:
1) The World’s Most Effective A.I. Advisor and Assistant for Dating and Relationships
2) The Go-to Marketplace for Dating and Relationship

To ultimately reach our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) of creating 1 million happy marriages. We believe that with Viola.AI, we can make that goal a reality more efficiently, and much faster.

Building Viola.AI is no easy task. It sounds like a very complex project. How do you do plan to build up your content database, and how long do you envision it will take to get it to a point where it’s big enough to be really useful?

V: We are working in stages for Viola.AI. In fact, we are already developing the MVP of the matching learning algorithm (which will be used for Viola.AI) through one of our products — LunchClick chatbot.

We are garnering support right now to fuel Viola.AI’s development, and we target to complete the AI and Machine Learning capabilities of Viola.AI by March 2018 and the rest of the development by end of 2018.

Moving slightly onto tech, can you explain why you chose VIOLA Tokens, and what the utility of the token will be?

V: VIOLA tokens will be the currency used within Viola.AI by the users and vendors, merchants and experts in the marketplace.

Singles can use VIOLA tokens to purchase dating-related products or services. Singles and couples can also use VIOLA tokens to purchase dating/romance-related goods and services in the marketplace recommended by Viola.AI.

Viola.AI also works with its community to generate dating and relationship content for every user based on their relationship stage. Viola.AI will then learn from the best and highest rated answers and reward these contributors with VIOLA tokens for their efforts and wisdom.

In the past, contributors (for example, sites like Reddit, Quora, etc) would get nothing for their contributions but with Viola.AI, contributors with good content will be rewarded for their efforts and wisdom.

The community is no doubt wondering if you can provide any details on your token sale. Is there anything you can reveal to us yet on this front? Have you set any dates, tentative or otherwise?

V: Yes, our pre-sale has started! There is a 50% token bonus for early supporters, so do join us and check out https://viola.ai/ to participate! We will unveil more updates as we go along.

If people want to follow Viola.AI project, where should they go?

V: We welcome everyone who is interested to know more about our project! Feel free to join our community group is on Telegram: https://t.me/ViolaAI and ask us any questions!

Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to leave our readers?

V: The Blockchain and A.I. revolution has just begun. Even though it is still in its infancy, we know with certainty that this revolution would shake up many industries and businesses including ours.

We believe that this would be the key to building a better dating and relationship industry. This revolution would also enable the crowd to share in the fruits of their contributions via smart contracts and spread the financial benefits to the many rather than being left in the hands of a few. A.I. technology often has a bad reputation; slated to putting millions of people out of job and potentially creating chaos. We are convicted that A.I. technology can be channelled to create love and promote better understanding for relationships.

We have a dream. Our dream is to transform the global dating and relationship landscape by helping billions of people create better lifetime relationships. We believe this can be done through Viola.AI. — an AI driven, decentralised market place for love and relationship. By being part of our project, you are helping us fulfil our dream. By being part of our project, you are helping billions of singles and couples fulfil their dreams of finding love and happiness. We thank you for your consideration and your support.

Stay tuned for next posts as we meet the rest of the team behind Viola.AI.

Join the discussion on Viola.AI Telegram: https://t.me/ViolaAI

For detailed information, please visit www.viola.ai