Online daters using Yahoo Inc’s personals service will now be able to get to check out whether a possible match has a deep voice or quirky mannerisms before embarking on a first date.Yahoo is trying to ease the online dating experience. The company said on Monday it will now offer voice and video greetings to singles for free to spruce up their online personal ads on its service.‘‘Online dating is becoming much more mainstream. The beauty of voice and video is that it tells people more about the other person through the nuances in their speech and their mannerisms and you can’t get that with just text,’’ Samantha Lazear, senior product manager for Yahoo Personals, said. More than 17 million people viewed online personals last year and 2.5 million people have paid for online personals, according to Jupiter Research.To use the video and voice components, web surfers need a microphone and webcam. ‘‘What we have found is ads that have photos get eight times as many responses as ads with just text. We think the more people learn (through voice and video), they are more likely to respond,’’ American Demographics reported that only 22 per cent of the 98 million singles in the US in 2002 had tried online dating, Lazear said, adding that the industry has just scratched the surface. (Reuters)
