The App That Scores Your LINE Chats Now Pulls Tarot Cards

Merotalk (めろとーく), a Japanese app that grades your relationship by reading your LINE chat history, added tarot readings on Oct. 11. A week earlier, its developer and the team behind Love Type Diagnosis, one of Japan's most popular love-personality quizzes, launched a daily love fortune slip.

Two love quizzes popular with young people in Japan have turned to fortune-telling at almost the same time, and the reason is simple. A quiz gives you an answer once. A fortune can be drawn every day. The quiz company's press release says as much: users wanted to use their love types more often in daily life.

Merotalk's appeal is easy to see. Export a one-on-one chat from LINE, Japan's default messaging app, hand the file over, and about ten seconds later you get a compatibility score out of 100, a breakdown of who replies faster and who is more affectionate, and one of 16 relationship types. Released in January, it had 7,027 ratings in Japan by Oct. 14. One reviewer scored a chat with an ex-boyfriend at 32 and wrote that this was the one thing they could not forgive.

The new tarot is read by AI. According to the update notes, you shuffle and pick the cards yourself in a "fortune room," and Meromaru, the app's AI mascot, interprets them one by one. Meromaru already works as an in-app love adviser that draws on your chat history. The app has a bolder AI feature too: it can imitate the other person's way of texting, so you can try a message on the simulated version before sending it for real.

Love Type Diagnosis went with fortune slips. The quiz sorts people into 16 romantic types, each with a cartoon character, and its operator says it has been taken 100 million times. Love Omikuji, launched Oct. 5, lets you pick your type and draw one free slip a day. Draw bad luck, and ¥100 buys a "cleansing" and another draw. A gold slip arrives on LINE on the first of every month, and a paid reading combines your love type with Sanmeigaku, a birth-date fortune system. The reading page notes that the text is generated automatically from what you enter.

The timing is not a coincidence. In August, Merotalk's developer, appful, signed a partnership with the quiz's operator, LoveChara, to build dating apps and fortune-telling content together. Appful says it makes apps for teenagers and that its products have 1.5 million downloads.

Young users and shared chats make privacy hard to avoid. Merotalk says scoring happens on the phone, and that parts of a chat go to Google's Gemini only when you use the AI features, after a consent screen. Its privacy policy, updated Oct. 13, adds that the person on the other side of an imported chat can ask to see or delete their data. A reviewer had worried back in February that the chats were training an AI; the policy now answers that in writing.

Fortune-telling may be only the start. On the quiz's reading page, the next product is already marked "coming soon": a reading on whether the person you like is into you.

From scoring chats to drawing slips, these apps keep answering one question: does this person like me back? A score settles it once. But when you like someone, you want to ask again tomorrow.