GoFrendly & Violet: Swedish AI Drives Global Expansion

The social network GoFrendly is planning on a global launch in 2023. In collaboration with Violet AI, they want to make it easier for women to build meaningful friendships, across the globe.

"Our focus has always been on the user experience of our members, and by leveraging customized AI solutions, we can create the app that our members truly deserve," says Ulrika Lilja, founder and Chief Marketing Officer at GoFrendly.

GoFrendly was launched in 2016 and currently has about 200,000 female members across Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and India.

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Customized AI solutions

From being an app where users could input their age, location, and interests to find like-minded individuals to socialize with, GoFrendly is now working together with Violet to customize AI solutions to improve the user experience and the precision of matches.

"The first version of the app was simple, and we found that our matching engine was too static and limited. If a user filled out a field incorrectly, it could cost them interesting matches. That's when we reached out to Violet," says Claudia Gård, founder and Chief Operating Officer at GoFrendly.

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From the left: Anna Rydin, Mattias Guilotte, Ulrika Lilja and Claudia Gård.

Inspiration from the tech giants

Violet AI are experts in the field, and to help GoFrendly move from a traditional filtering function to dynamic matching based on precise and sensitive algorithms, they took inspiration from Google, Tesla, and the National Library of Sweden, all of whom have trained models to understand text and language. These models were adapted and fine-tuned by Violet and trained on GoFrendly's data.

"Manually, it's difficult to handle this amount of data or understand the patterns, as it involves very large amounts of text data from mainly chat and discussion groups. We have used proven algorithms to extract and classify keywords and relate them to similar words in the texts," says Anna Rydin, Machine Learning Engineer and NLP Specialist at Violet."

"Due to the vast amount of data available to them, particularly in the field of NLP (natural language processing), Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other companies have been able to develop astonishing AI algorithms in recent years. GoFrendly is one of the few platforms in Europe that is now starting to have such large amounts of data that it is possible to develop new and exciting AI solutions based on it," says Mattias Guilotte, Head of Business Development at Violet AI.

AI at the core of global expansion

With the help of Violet, the user experience of platform has improved. As GoFrendly expands globally, user experience is a crucial factor for continued success.

"At each launch in new cities and as usage increases, we face a number of challenges. This involves being able to verify new members and maintain platform security, as well as quickly learning which matching patterns work in a local market and automatically creating activities and content for new users. Here, AI is not just a fun feature, but crucial for rapid growth and to ensure that new users have a good and safe experience," says Ulrika Lilja at GoFrendly.

"How can we, as a smaller business, challenge big players like Facebook and Google? We know we have the expertise, but we also need to identify the areas where we can make a difference. The fact that user experience is declining among the tech giants is noteworthy and an opportunity for us to showcase how we can apply AI to enhance people's everyday lives," concludes Mattias Guilotte.

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