Hinge says conversations that included a voice note were 41% more likely to lead to a date in 2025 than the classic swipe-and-message route (Hinge Labs, via DatingNews, December 2025). That claim sits on top of a broader shift: WhatsApp alone carries 7 billion voice messages a day (Meta, 2022), a single recorded ‘hello’ of about 390 ms is enough for listeners to agree on a speaker’s personality (McAleer et al., PLOS ONE 2014), and 52% of U.S. online daters say they have run into someone they believed was a scammer (Pew Research Center, 2023). Voice is now a profile feature, a chat feature and a safety question at once. This roundup focuses on that voice layer; for user counts, marriages and scam losses across the whole market, see our broader online dating statistics. We aggregated data from Hinge, Match Group and Bumble filings, the Pew Research Center, the Australian Institute of Criminology, and peer-reviewed studies in PLOS ONE, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Evolution and Human Behavior and American Psychologist.
TL;DR
- Profiles with a voice prompt were 32% more likely to lead to a date (December 2025) and voice notes 41% more likely (2025 data), both company claims (Hinge, 2025).
- 7 billion voice messages are sent on WhatsApp every day on average (Meta, WhatsApp announcement 2022).
- Listeners judged personality from a ‘hello’ lasting about 391 ms (male) and 390 ms (female) (McAleer, Todorov and Belin, PLOS ONE 2014).
- Women’s minimum voice pitch explained up to 55% of the variance in men’s mate preferences at speed-dating events (Pisanski et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2018).
- Voice-only communication beat vision-only and combined communication for empathic accuracy across 5 experiments, N = 1,772 (Kraus, American Psychologist 2017).
- Voice-based interactions built stronger social bonds than text without more awkwardness (Kumar and Epley, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 2021).
- 52% of U.S. online daters say they came across someone they think was trying to scam them (Pew Research Center, 2023).
- 72.3% of just under 10,000 Australian dating app users surveyed had been subjected to online dating-app-facilitated sexual violence (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2022).
- 80% of Gen Z daters surveyed prefer to meet people whose profiles are verified (Bumble, 2025 survey).
- Hinge payers rose 23% to 2.3 million while Match Group’s total payers fell 5% to 13.8 million (Match Group, Q3 2026 shareholder letter).
1. Voice Prompts on Profiles: What the Apps Disclose
Hinge launched Voice Prompts in October 2021, letting daters answer a profile prompt with a recording of up to 30 seconds instead of text (Hinge launch announcement). Every figure below is the company’s own claim, released without a published method, so the useful reading is the trend rather than any single number.
That trend is a shrinking headline. Early in 2022, the company described profiles with a voice prompt as 1.4 times more likely to lead to an actual date; by late 2023 it quoted a 66% lift, and its December 2025 newsroom post put it at 32% more likely to lead to a date. A lift that narrows as a feature matures is what you would expect once early adopters (likely the most engaged daters) are joined by everyone else. The comparison is also observational: people who bother to record their voice may differ from those who do not.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Hinge users who recorded and uploaded a voice prompt between the October 2021 launch and February 2022, and share of users who had played one | More than 1 million recorded; over 70% had played one | Hinge’s own claim, CPO Michelle Parsons to ABC News, February 2022 |
| Profiles with a voice prompt compared with profiles without one: chance of receiving a like, of matching, and of going on a date | 10% more likely to receive a like; 2 times more likely to match; 1.4 times more likely to go on a date | Hinge’s own claim (ABC News, February 2022) |
| Hinge users with a voice prompt on their profile compared with users without one: likelihood of going on a date | 66% more likely | Hinge’s own claim, reported by The Daily Dot, November 2023 |
| Profiles with a voice prompt compared with profiles without one: likelihood of leading to a date | 32% more likely | Hinge Newsroom, Love Lessons, December 11, 2025 |
Context note: when the feature was a few months old, the company said it had more than 800,000 paying users; its parent now reports 2.3 million Hinge payers (see section 6). The voice prompt numbers therefore describe a much larger and more mainstream user base in 2025 than in 2022.
2. Voice Notes in Chat: Volume, Length, and Date Rates
Voice notes are sent after a match, inside the conversation, so they measure behaviour rather than self-presentation. The striking pattern is stability: the date lift the company reports has hovered between 40% and 48% across three data years, ending at 41% more likely to lead to a date in 2025 in a statement from Hinge Labs lead relationship scientist Logan Ury. A figure that holds steady while usage grows is more persuasive than one that spikes once, although the comparison group (‘swipe and message’) and the method are still undisclosed.
Demand is real but not universal. About a third of Gen Z daters want more voice notes, which leaves the other 65% (100% minus 35%) not asking for more. The 30.6-second average length suggests daters treat a voice note like a short spoken message, not a call, which keeps the effort low on both sides.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Conversations that included a voice note compared with conversations without one: likelihood of leading to a date, by data year | 48% more likely (reported November 2023); 40% more likely (2024 data); 41% more likely (2025 data, compared with swipe and message) | Hinge’s own claims (The Daily Dot 2023; Hinge Dating Sunday guide, December 2024; DatingNews, December 2025) |
| Average length of a voice note sent on Hinge in 2023 | 30.6 seconds | Hinge’s own data, reported by The Daily Dot, November 2023 |
| Voice notes sent on Hinge from February 1 to 14, 2025, compared with the same period in 2024 | Up 34% | Hinge Newsroom, Valentine’s Day guide, February 4, 2026 |
| Gen Z daters who want to receive more voice notes (all Gen Z / Gen Z men), and Gen Z daters who say voice notes make them feel more able to connect | 35% / 39%; 33% | Hinge Labs, 2025 Gen Z D.A.T.E. Report (about 30,000 daters surveyed) and Valentine’s Day guide, 2026 |
| Voice messages sent per day on WhatsApp, for scale outside dating | 7 billion on average | Meta, New Voice Message Features on WhatsApp, March 30, 2022 |
3. Vocal First Impressions: What Research Says About Attraction
The science explains why apps bother with audio, and also why the effect is smaller than marketing suggests. A one-word greeting carries enough information for strangers to agree on how trustworthy and dominant a speaker sounds: two dimensions explained about 88% of the variance in personality ratings of a ‘hello’ that lasted under half a second (McAleer, Todorov and Belin, PLOS ONE 2014). That is the cue a voice prompt exposes before any photo-based swipe decision is final.
Live dating adds a second layer: people change their voices for someone they like. At real speed-dating events, men “lowered the minimum pitch of their voices” toward women who were widely desired, and women used a “higher and more variable voice pitch towards men they selected” (Pisanski et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2018). But a multimodal speed-dating study found that pre-date voice ratings did not reliably predict who wanted a second meeting, while visual attractiveness did (Roth, Samara and Kret, Evolution and Human Behavior 2021). The honest summary: a recorded voice shapes impressions, but faces still dominate the first decision. Voice quality biases are their own field, covered in our vocal fry and creaky voice statistics.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Average length of the single word ‘hello’ that listeners used to rate personality, male / female speakers | 391 ms / 390 ms | McAleer, Todorov and Belin, PLOS ONE 2014 |
| Speakers recorded and online raters recruited for the ‘hello’ study | 64 speakers (32 male); 320 raters, of whom 10 (3.1%) were excluded | McAleer, Todorov and Belin, PLOS ONE 2014 |
| Variance in personality ratings explained by two dimensions (trustworthiness and dominance), male / female voices | 88% / 88.1% | McAleer, Todorov and Belin, PLOS ONE 2014 |
| Adults recorded during real speed-dating events | 30 | Pisanski et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2018 |
| Variance in men’s mate preferences explained by women’s minimum voice pitch | Up to 55% | Pisanski et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2018 |
| Change in men’s minimum voice pitch when speaking with women who were highly desired by other men | Lowered | Pisanski et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2018 |
| Young adults in a speed-dating study of sight, sound and scent, and length of each date | 67 participants; 4-minute dates; pre-date voice ratings were not a robust predictor of first-date choices | Roth, Samara and Kret, Evolution and Human Behavior 2021 |
| Weighted mean correlation between facial asymmetry (an index of developmental stability) and rated voice attractiveness, men / women | -.23 / -.29 | Hill et al., Evolution and Human Behavior 2017 |
Recency flag: these are the most recent available peer-reviewed data on voice and first impressions that we could verify (McAleer et al. 2014; Pisanski et al. 2018; Hill et al. 2017). None of them tested a dating app voice prompt directly.
4. Voice, Video, or Text: Which Channel Builds Connection
The lab evidence favours voice over text, and sometimes even over video. In five experiments, people who only listened read others’ emotions more accurately than those who watched and listened, a result that challenges the assumption that the face carries most emotional information (Kraus, American Psychologist 2017). In a separate program, voice-based conversations created stronger social bonds than text with no increase in awkwardness, yet people still chose text because they overestimated how awkward a call would be (Kumar and Epley, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 2021).
That gap between expected and actual awkwardness is the opening that voice notes fill: they let a dater be heard without the live pressure of a call. Daters already said so before the latest feature wave: in 2021, most young singles preferred a phone call over text before a first meeting, and about half of Gen Z had a video date before meeting in person (YPulse, reporting Match’s Singles in America 2021). Live audio rooms show a similar listen-first habit, as our social audio listener statistics document.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Experiments and participants testing voice-only communication against vision-only and combined audio-video communication | 5 experiments, N = 1,772 | Kraus, American Psychologist 2017 |
| Result: empathic accuracy with voice-only communication compared with vision-only and multisense communication | Higher with voice-only | Kraus, American Psychologist 2017 |
| People asked to predict what reconnecting with an old friend by email or by phone would feel like | 200 | Kumar and Epley, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 2021 |
| Result: voice interactions (phone, video, voice chat) compared with text interactions (email, text chat) | Stronger social bonds, no more awkwardness | Kumar and Epley, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 2021 |
| Young singles who prefer to get to know someone by phone call rather than text before meeting in person; singles who had a video date before meeting in person, Gen Z / Millennials | 70%; 51% / 45% | Match, Singles in America 2021 (via YPulse) |
| Dedicated users interviewed in an academic study of the voice-first dating app Soul | 18 | Shen, Xu, LC and Lu, ACM CHI 2024 |
Recency flag: most recent available data on pre-date calls is Match’s Singles in America 2021; the 2025 and 2026 editions that we could find did not publish comparable call or video-date figures.
5. Safety and Verification Before the First Meeting
Hearing or seeing a match before meeting is partly a safety habit, and the platforms are now formalising it with mandatory checks. The strongest verification claim comes from Tinder: in markets where Face Check (a short video selfie compared against profile photos to confirm the person is real) is required, the company reported an over 60% decrease in exposure to potential bad actors. Four months later, the parent described the effect as a more than 50% reduction in interactions with bad actors, with “only a minimal impact on revenue”. If that holds as the check spreads to Hinge, verification stops being a trade-off between safety and growth.
Independent surveys explain the demand. Daters report scams and harassment at rates that make a quick voice or video check before meeting a sensible precaution rather than a novelty (Pew Research Center, Key findings about online dating in the U.S., 2023; Australian Institute of Criminology, 2022). One caution on voice itself: a recorded voice note is also a voice sample, and cloned voices are already used in family-emergency fraud, as covered in our voice cloning family scam statistics.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Tinder Face Check: decrease in exposure to potential bad actors / in bad actor reports in markets with the feature (October 2025), and reduction in interactions with bad actors (February 2026) | Over 60% / over 40%; more than 50% | Match Group’s own claims (Tinder release, October 22, 2025; Q4 2025 shareholder letter, February 3, 2026) |
| Selfie verification by existing Hinge users after a product change called Signals, in tests | Up 15% | Match Group, Q2 2026 shareholder letter, August 4, 2026 |
| Gen Z daters surveyed who prefer to meet up with people who have verified profiles | 80% | Bumble’s own survey, Bumble dating features announcement, 2025 |
| U.S. online dating users who say they have come across someone they think was trying to scam them | 52% | Pew Research Center, 2023 (survey of 6,034 adults, July 5 to 17, 2022) |
| U.S. online dating users who received unsolicited sexually explicit messages or images, all users / women under 50 | 38% / 56% | Pew Research Center, 2023 |
| U.S. online dating users who say someone kept contacting them after they said they were not interested / who were threatened with physical harm | 30% / 6% | Pew Research Center, 2023 |
| U.S. adults who say online dating is a very or somewhat safe way to meet people, 2019 compared with 2022 | 53% vs 48% | Pew Research Center, 2023 |
| Australian dating app users surveyed (just under 10,000) who had been subjected to online dating-app-facilitated sexual violence in the previous five years | 72.3% | Australian Institute of Criminology, 2022, via ACS Information Age |
Context note: Bumble lets women start a voice or video call as soon as they match, and calls happen inside the app without exchanging phone numbers, which keeps a personal number private if the match goes nowhere (Bumble, video chat and voice call guide).
6. Who Is on the Apps: Users and Payers in 2026
Voice features matter most where the users and the money are, and in 2026 that is increasingly Hinge. The brand that pioneered voice prompts grew payers 23% to 2.3 million in the third quarter of 2026, while Tinder’s payers declined 4% and the group’s total fell 5%. Correlation is not causation, but the app that invested earliest in voice is the one still adding paying users.
Bumble, the other listed U.S. group, kept shrinking: its quarterly 10-Q shows total paying users down by 499.1 thousand year over year (3,574.9 minus 3,075.8, about a 14.0% decline by our calculation) (Bumble, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026). The table’s last row is a reminder that active use in any single year is a minority behaviour, so voice features compete for a fairly small pool of daters.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Match Group total revenue and total payers, Q3 2026 compared with Q3 2025 | $891 million (down 3%); 13.8 million payers (down 5%), revenue per payer $21.19 (up 3%) | Match Group, Q3 2026 shareholder letter, November 2, 2026 |
| Tinder direct revenue and payers, Q3 2026 compared with Q3 2025 | $480 million (down 2%); 8.9 million payers (down 4%) | Match Group, Q3 2026 shareholder letter |
| Hinge payers and revenue per payer, Q3 2026 compared with Q3 2025 | 2.3 million (up 23%); $31.81 (down 3%) | Match Group, Q3 2026 shareholder letter |
| Hinge direct revenue and global monthly active users, Q3 2026 compared with Q3 2025 | $221 million (up 19%); monthly active users up 12% | Match Group, Q3 2026 shareholder letter |
| Bumble Inc. total paying users, three months ended September 30, 2026 compared with 2025 | 3,075.8 thousand vs 3,574.9 thousand | Bumble, Q3 2026 Form 10-Q |
| Bumble App / Badoo App and Other paying users, Q3 2026 compared with Q3 2025 | 1,990.5 thousand vs 2,344.1 thousand (down 15.1%) / 1,085.3 thousand vs 1,230.8 thousand (down 11.8%) | Bumble, Q3 2026 Form 10-Q |
| Bumble Inc. total revenue, Q3 2026 compared with Q3 2025 | $207.1 million vs $246.2 million | Bumble, Q3 2026 Form 10-Q |
| U.S. adults who used a dating site or app in the past year | 9% | Pew Research Center, 2023 (survey fielded July 2022) |
Outlier note: Tinder’s daily active users returned to year-over-year growth in September 2026 for the first time in three and a half years, which the company credits partly to Trust and Safety work and new features for Gen Z.
Summary: Dating App Voice Prompt & Voice Note Statistics by the Numbers
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Voice prompt profiles (December 2025) / voice note conversations (2025 data): more likely to lead to a date | 32% / 41% | Hinge’s own claims, 2025 |
| Voice messages sent per day on WhatsApp | 7 billion | Meta, 2022 |
| Length of a ‘hello’ that was enough for consistent personality ratings, male / female | 391 ms / 390 ms | McAleer et al., PLOS ONE 2014 |
| Variance in voice personality ratings explained by two dimensions | About 88% | McAleer et al., PLOS ONE 2014 |
| Variance in men’s mate preferences explained by women’s minimum voice pitch | Up to 55% | Pisanski et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2018 |
| Pre-date voice ratings as predictor of speed-date choices (67 young adults) | Not robust; visual attractiveness was | Roth, Samara and Kret, Evolution and Human Behavior 2021 |
| Voice-only communication and empathic accuracy (5 experiments) | Higher accuracy, N = 1,772 | Kraus, American Psychologist 2017 |
| Voice compared with text interactions | Stronger bonds, no more awkwardness | Kumar and Epley, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 2021 |
| Tinder Face Check: decrease in exposure to potential bad actors | Over 60% | Match Group’s own claim, October 2025 |
| Hinge payers / Match Group total payers, Q3 2026 | 2.3 million (up 23%) / 13.8 million (down 5%) | Match Group, Q3 2026 |
| Bumble Inc. total paying users, Q3 2026 compared with Q3 2025 | 3,075.8 thousand vs 3,574.9 thousand | Bumble, Q3 2026 Form 10-Q |
| Gen Z daters who prefer verified profiles | 80% | Bumble’s own survey, 2025 |
| U.S. online daters who came across a suspected scammer | 52% | Pew Research Center, 2023 |
| Americans who say dating companies should require background checks before someone creates a profile | Six in ten | Pew Research Center, 2023 |
| Australian app users subjected to online dating-app-facilitated sexual violence | 72.3% | Australian Institute of Criminology, 2022 |
| Australian survey respondents subjected to in-person dating-app-facilitated sexual violence | One in three | Australian Institute of Criminology, 2022 |
Methodology and Sources
- Hinge newsroom and press pages: Voice Prompts launch, October 27, 2021; Dating Sunday guide, December 30, 2024; 2025 Gen Z D.A.T.E. Report, November 19, 2025; Love Lessons, December 11, 2025; Valentine’s Day guide, February 4, 2026. All figures are company claims.
- Hinge figures reported by named outlets: ABC News / Good Morning America, February 13, 2022; The Daily Dot, November 13, 2023; CNBC via NBC Miami, January 14, 2024; DatingNews, December 31, 2025.
- Match Group SEC filings: Q3 2026 prepared remarks, November 2, 2026; Q2 2026 prepared remarks, August 4, 2026; Q4 2025 prepared remarks, February 3, 2026.
- Tinder Face Check press release, October 22, 2025.
- Match, Singles in America 2021, as reported by YPulse, November 11, 2021.
- Bumble: Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026; Q2 2026 results release, August 5, 2026; dating features and ID verification announcement, 2025; video chat and voice call guide.
- Pew Research Center, Key findings about online dating in the U.S., February 2, 2023 (6,034 U.S. adults surveyed July 5 to 17, 2022).
- Australian Institute of Criminology, media release, October 4, 2022, with figures from the report Sexual harassment, aggression and violence victimisation among mobile dating app and website users in Australia, as reported by ACS Information Age.
- Meta, New Voice Message Features on WhatsApp, March 30, 2022.
- Peer-reviewed research: McAleer, Todorov and Belin, PLOS ONE 2014; Pisanski et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2018; Hill et al., Evolution and Human Behavior 2017; Roth, Samara and Kret, Evolution and Human Behavior 2021; Kraus, American Psychologist 2017; Kumar and Epley, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 2021; Shen, Xu, LC and Lu, ACM CHI 2024. Participant counts for Roth et al. come from the PsyPost summary of the study, June 10, 2021.
- Data watch: Hinge’s voice figures change from release to release and none comes with a published method. Its voice prompt lift moved from 1.4 times (2022) to 66% (2023) to 32% (December 2025), and its voice note lift from 48% (reported November 2023 and repeated by CNBC in January 2024) to 40% (2024 data) to 41% (2025 data); the 41% figure comes from a Hinge Labs statement quoted by DatingNews rather than a Hinge page we could find. Kraus 2017 reports N = 1,772 in the paper’s abstract, while the APA press release coverage says ‘more than 1,800 participants’; we use the abstract. Bumble’s 2025 ID verification footnote lists the non-verified comparison group as ‘20,9491’ users, an apparent typo, so we did not use its match-rate claim. Bumble’s Q3 2026 10-Q was available before we found a matching earnings release, so check the release for any restated metrics; as a cross-check, the Q2 2026 release reported 3,157.2 thousand total paying users, so the Q3 figure of 3,075.8 thousand continues the decline sequentially. The Pew data come from a July 2022 survey and the Singles in America call figures from 2021 (most recent available data); the McAleer, Hill, Pisanski and Kraus studies are also older than three years. We used SEC-filed payer figures where third-party earnings summaries circulated different totals.
Last updated: November 7, 2026. We update this roundup quarterly, and the next refresh is expected when Match Group publishes its Q4 2026 shareholder letter in February 2027.