On a date during lockdown?

New Delhi, April 20  If your dating life hasn’t already gone to the dumps, Lockdown 2.0 most definitely will do the needful!

But this doesn’t mean you have to let your love life hang in suspended animation. Virtual dates allow you to scope out your love interest without putting yourself out there.

The Bumble App has released a bundle of customised features to help you do just that. The new features will help improve how people can connect with each other during this period of social distancing as dating moves online.

By expanding its distance filters to allow users to match with anyone in their country, users can now exercise the option to connect with people “nationwide” in their app settings; and are no longer constricted to the 1 to 100 miles of their location settings.

New features that are now live within the app include a “Virtual Dating” badge that will appear in users” profiles who are open to date via video chat. This badge will allow Bumble users to find and filter their prospective matches based on who is looking to date virtually.

The company has seen a 29 per cent increase in messages sent on its platform in India and noted that more than two in five chats are turning into meaningful conversations with a large number of messages exchanged. Because of this increased usage of Bumble”s chat platform, the company is giving its users new tools to enhance their chat experience and enable them to get to know each other better. In addition to the app”s existing chat, voice call, and video chat options, Bumble users can now record and send audio notes to their matches and reply to specific messages within their chats.