The Japanese Government has spent over £14m on a new AI-backed digital dating app in a last-ditch attempt to reverse the country’s stalled birth rate.

Japan’s population currently stand at just over 126 million but has been steadily declining for years, with, for a variety of reasons, women having fewer, if any, children. In fact, it has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Many schools and nurseries have had to close over the last decade due to a lack of students with the number of babies born in Japan last year hitting an all time low of just under 850,000.

Combine that with a population living longer and you get a very troubled economy, with less workers supporting more retirees, making it difficult to effectively run Japan’s welfare and healthcare systems.

We are especially planning to offer subsidies to local governments operating or starting up matchmaking projects that use AI. We hope this support will help reverse the decline in the nation’s birth rate.

Japanese Government Spokesperson – Japan Times

The subsidies will be handed out to local councils in Japan from 2021, after the COVID-19 pandemic, when it will be safe for dating couples to mix in public again.

Nearly half of Japan’s local prefectures already offer a dating service that includes names, age, educational background and income but this new drive will add a layer of artificial intelligence over that to improve the success rate of the app. The new software will match couples based on interests, values, hobbies and activities for more compatible matches.

When asked to comment, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said, hopefully the new machine-learning algorithms could spice things up, and lead to more babies.