The App That Scores Your LINE Chats Now Pulls Tarot Cards

One review on Japan's App Store, posted in February 2026, sums up Merotalk (めろとーく) better than its own marketing. The reviewer fed the app their LINE chat history with an ex-boyfriend and got 32 out of 100. That, they wrote, was the one thing she could not forgive. The app, released on Jan. 18, works on a simple premise: export a one-on-one chat from LINE, Japan's default messaging app, hand the text file to Merotalk, and about ten seconds later it returns a compatibility score, a letter grade from A to E, four sub-scores for message volume, tone, reply pace and thoughtfulness, and one of 16 relationship types. By Oct. 14 it had 7,027 ratings in Japan and sat at No. 66 on the free Utilities chart.

Version 2.13.0, which landed on Oct. 11 Beijing time, rebuilt the app's fortune-telling section. In a new "fortune room," you shuffle and pick the tarot cards yourself, and the app's AI mascot, a fluffy blue creature called Meromaru, reads them one at a time. The daily fortune became a scored "card of the day." The same update added analysis of group chats and a daily free consultation ticket for non-paying users. A chat-analytics app moving into tarot sounds like a swerve, but Merotalk was never only arithmetic. Its AI already writes monthly summaries of what the two of you talked about, gives Meromaru-voiced advice based on your history, and offers a "persona chat" in which the AI imitates the other person's way of talking, so you can test a message on a simulated crush before sending the real one.

The developer, appful, is adding more. Its privacy policy, updated on Oct. 13, describes a "reply meter" that scores how the message you are typing is likely to land, after you choose how you want to come across. It also runs as a Merotalk keyboard inside LINE and other apps, where the policy calls it a "myaku-ari meter," Japanese slang for checking whether someone is into you. According to the policy, the keyboard reads only your own draft, never the other person's messages, and the scoring is handled by TypeSafe AI in the United States.

The fortune push is a joint one. In August, appful signed a broad partnership with LoveChara, the company behind Love Type Diagnosis, a 16-type romantic personality quiz in which each type is a cartoon character. Appful says its apps have 1.5 million downloads and more than 500 million views on social video; LoveChara says its quiz has been taken 100 million times by 50 million people. The two said they would build dating apps and fortune-telling content together.

The first products arrived on Oct. 5. Love Omikuji is a daily romance fortune slip: pick your love type and draw once a day, free, with no account. Each day offers three themes drawn from contact, true feelings, distance, yourself and the other person, and every user gets the same three that day. Draw "bad luck" and you can pay ¥100 for an oharai-style cleansing and draw again. A monthly gold slip with 13 sections arrives through LINE on the first of each month. A paid "love reading certificate" layers the quiz type onto Sanmeigaku, a birth-date fortune system, with 18 sections about you or 20 about a pair; each section is half free, the rest unlocked by a one-time purchase. A line at the bottom of the reading page says the text is generated automatically from what you enter.

LoveChara's release gives its own reason for the move: users wanted to use the love types more often in daily life and to understand themselves more deeply. That is the limit of a personality quiz. You get your type once, and it does not change tomorrow. A fortune slip can be drawn every day, the monthly one is pushed to your LINE inbox, and the certificates unlock in layers, with a third, "is this person into me" reading listed as coming soon. Merotalk faces the same problem from the other side: once a chat has been scored, there is little reason to come back, which the card room and the daily ticket now supply.

Appful describes itself as building apps for teenagers, and the reviews read that way. One user says premium is out of reach for a middle-schooler; another sent the result to a boyfriend, who promised to show more affection. Half of every imported chat, though, belongs to someone who may never have heard of the app. Merotalk computes its scores on the phone. Only the AI summary, advice and persona chat send message text, sender names and timestamps through its Tokyo servers to Google's Gemini, after a consent screen, and the policy says the paid API tier keeps Google from using that data to improve its products. A separate section addresses the chat partner directly: they can write in to see or delete their data, and users are told to get the other person's consent where needed. A review from February had already worried that the AI was learning from people's chats; the policy now answers it in writing.

The great-blessing slip in LoveChara's release carries a short line of advice: better to act than to wait. Merotalk has added a step before acting. You can rehearse the message on an AI version of the other person first.