Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Apple requires us to say you get more as part of premium. They have silly rules that tie our hands on stuff. You have access to everything as part of the free tier. Hopefully the recent court case from Riot will help make it easier for us to clarify this.
Comment · 1 year ago
We published in the top conference of computer vision a peer reviewed study of our accuracy. On average we are twice the accuracy of a professional nutritionist. The product is free to try. If you're not happy with the accuracy, don't pay! We have around half a million people each month coming to our app and a vast majority stick around and are happy with the results.

If there's something we missed on your food shoot me a DM, I'd love to dig in.

Comment · 1 year ago
Our app uses LiDAR for portion and is a lot more accurate than ChatGPT, ChatGPT doesn't have access to LiDAR and is less accurate.

Our app is free to use the most accurate model, ChatGPT is paid for the most accurate model and has usage limits.

Our app plots your data on nice charts and has visuals specific to understanding your data over time visually (e.g. how has my sodium intake been changing day over day or what has my average weekly caloric intake been when deducting active calories from fitness trackers).

Our app integrates with Apple Health and soon will integrate with Android Fit so you can export your data to other apps, share with health professionals, etc.

Comment · 1 year ago
You have access to all of the same features without upgrading to premium. Just click the "x" on the paywall.
Comment · 1 year ago
^^ 100%. Accuracy, speed, weight loss efficacy. Improving on each of this is a different solution.
Comment · 1 year ago
I got into this space because I saw many family members struggling with weight and nutrition. One of the leading causes of death in the United States is Diabetes, largely caused by poor nutrition and lack of exercise.

I've spent the last 10 years of my life researching why this is and how I can help. What I've heard from countless users is that it takes to long to track what they're eating and learn how they can improve.

I've never tried to claim that the selling point of AI is that it's "vastly better", I've just tried to build tools to help people. The voice note feature in our app accompanied by a kitchen scale is the most accurate thing you can do to track nutrition and it actually is much faster than what existed on the market before we launched.

The photo logging feature is more accurate than what most users did before we launched and is by far the fastest way you can track, but yes, it has it's limitations, and unlike our competitors I won't pretend it's perfect. If you're eating out at dinner, and the alternative would be you didn't log the meal, it's a great option.

At the end of the day accuracy actually is not the most important thing if you really care about helping people. Education is what matters. People need to learn which foods and ingredients are the problematic ones and why. Our app accomplishes that better than any solution that existed on the market before we launched.

Comment · 1 year ago
100%. You should not trust photo based calorie tracking and should only use it when there is no other realistic choice (e.g. eating out).

You especially should not trust an app that does not do any research on the accuracy of it's algorithm or claims to be "consistently accurate" as many of them do currently. The truth is these algorithms have the potential to be accurate when values are averaged out over the long term, but dish to dish they will have occasionally wildly inaccurate results.

Comment · 1 year ago
We do a lot of research on preventing eating disorders. As the article mentions we did not suggest she lose weight down to being underweight like other apps did.

Our app has the fruit and veg counters ABOVE the calorie meter on the dashboard. The reason for this is that maximization mindset (e.g. maximizing fruits and veg) is way healthier than a minimization mindset (e.g. minimizing calories or carbs).

We actually even tried to fully remove calories from the app at some point but we had a vast majority of users churn and decided it would be healthier for people who want calorie tracking to stick with our app by having it present, but requiring them to scroll past the features that promote a healthier mindset to get there. Feedback from users has been amazing that they've slowly started focusing more on fruits and veg.

Comment · 1 year ago
We do! You can read about our original approach back at Google AI in our CVPR publication here:

https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/papers/Thames...

We've since come up with a much more accurate approach. That said we also try to do some advanced technique to figure out what people were trying to log and not what the amount of food in the photo was. So for example if take a bite out of a bagel, we'll try to say 1 bagel since it's unlikely you wanted to log a bagel less a bite.

Comment · 1 year ago
Founder of https://snapcalorie.com and ex-Google AI researcher here. The article actually gets our pricing wrong, it's completely free to use SnapCalorie, the $79.99 price is a donation to support our research and help us continue providing the best tools to everyone for free.

We've published in top peer reviewed academic conferences and our algorithm (can't say the same for other apps) IS actually more accurate than people trying to visually estimate portion size, but the truth is both are quite inaccurate.

Most people won't spend the time to track, so photo logging is a faster and easier approximation. If you want more accurate logging you should use the voice logging feature and a kitchen scale (also completely free in our app).

As many mention the goal is to learn, not to tediously track every little thing. Do what's sustainable for you and helps achieve your health and fitness goals.

Comment · 1 year ago
Totally fair point. My guess though is most people who are getting 5-9 servings of whole fruits / vegetables per day consistently don't (or maybe shouldn't for long) have a goal of losing weight.

If people are hitting that goal then they can start moving into more nuanced dietary changes like minimizing adde sugars and sodium, or maximizing nuanced micros and diversity.

Comment · 1 year ago
Haha, you say this until Apple does a breaking change to the barcode library or Apple Health export and things stop working. Then you probably want them to change some stuff :)
Comment · 1 year ago
You can start a 7 day free trial and cancel immediately. There is also a freemium tier at the end if you don't end up converting. We don't normally advertise this because we've been struggling to handle the load and costs of new users, but hopefully as we scale up we'll be able to support a free tier for everyone!

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