Your Google Home will now help you find dates

Dating apps have always been very hands on -- full of swipes and texting -- but now some of them are making the move to be hands-free.

Plenty of Fish announced on Tuesday that it’s launched an integration with Google Home, which will read your messages aloud to you and allow you to compose and send replies. The point of this, according to a statement from the company is to make “the process of sending a message easier by allowing a user to speak freely, rather than type - more in line with a natural conversation.”

If anything involving a robot and romantically-charged messages can ever be considered natural, then sure. This moves comes on the heels of eHarmony announcing a similar partnership with the Amazon Echo last week. So why the sudden rush to add home assistant integration among these dating apps?

Well, Plenty of Fish told Mashable that it’s about starting a dialogue. They’ve positioned themselves as “the leader in conversations,” and they recently launched Spark, a feature which lets you start a chat based on a specific element of someone’s profile. They’ve seen an almost 25 percent rise in replies to messages for Android users and nearly 40 percent on iOS. This Google Home initiative is intended to build on that.

The company’s CEO, Hesam Hosseini, explained in a statement, “We’ve found that a good conversation is the number one indicator of a great date, so both Spark and the Google Assistant integration were created to help people easily connect and get the conversation started.”

Managing your dating life while also making dinner or cleaning your house sounds like a win for the busy single person. The reality, though, is a little more complex. For one thing, you’re letting an already invasive device even deeper into a very private aspect of your life.

Speech-to-text dictation is also still a clumsy enough affair that you may not actually save yourself any time in the end. Though it, of course, depends on your particular lifestyle. There’s also the issue that technically you’re conversing with a machine, not an actual love interest.

Only you can decide if this integration will help you convert those matches to IRL meetups even faster, but just be careful you don’t fall in love with your Google Home or Alexa along the way.