An AI-powered function that automatically identifies Indian food from photographs for calorie intake monitoring has been released by Indian health and wellness startup HealthifyMe, enabling users to manage their meal intake more effectively.
Given the wide range of cuisines, it is challenging to identify Indian meals from photos. Additionally, several individuals eat from a plate known as a Thaali in Hindi, which is filled with various food items in multiple portions. All of that, as well as serving sizes, must be understood by a model.
Users can take images of their meals using HealthifyMe‘s newest feature, called Snap, and attempt to identify the foods visible in the picture. Users may also grant the app access to their gallery, automatically scanning food images. Users can later review those images and the food items they contain. This lets users capture pictures with cameras and subsequently deal with calorie tracking.
The company claims that the model on the smartphone identifies images of food and sends them to servers for specialized dish recognition, which allegedly violates users’ privacy. As opposed to the option to take pictures of your meal for credit, the business claims that its gallery-based strategy works better because it has more time to identify food items.
When the model detects several items in an image, Snap will prompt you to tap on one of the items to add it to your calorie tracking. The rectangular rectangle that users view can be adjusted to focus on various items.
According to Tushar Vashisht, co-founder and CEO of HealthifyMe, the company began over 11 years ago as a food-tracking software, and it is still the critical use case for its free users.
Vashisht claimed that the startup has attempted to incorporate image-based food recognition throughout the years but that the creation of Snap was made simpler by the availability of more muscular generative AI models. According to the business, the feature can identify 150,000 different Indian foods.
HealthifyMe states that it can recognize food automatically with a 60–70% accuracy rate. The company said that even if the model cannot accurately identify a culinary item, consumers will still receive suggestions as to what the item might be. Human reviewers employed by the company look at incorrect recognitions and correct them. Users can also manually identify these incorrectly identified images to help the model. Vashisht stated that he is confident that the model’s accuracy will be greater than 80% within the upcoming month.
Other businesses are also focusing on AI-powered food detection, so HealthifyMe is not alone in the competition. The following year, Samsung’s meal-planning app Samsung Food aims to roll out this capability. Wade Norris, a former Google Lens programmer, is tackling a similar issue with his firm Snapcalorie, which has funding from Y-Combinator, Index Ventures, and Accel.
HealthifyMe wants to provide customers with more alternatives for meal logging in the coming weeks. Users may now share photos to HealthifyMe WhatsApp or tag them on X with a food image thanks to Snap’s introduction. In addition to enhancing its current AI-powered assistant, Ria, the company is developing a voice input function.
HealthifyMe’s primary subscription plan users can get an AI-powered fitness and nutrition assistant, meal planning, and healthy recipes for $4.80 (or $399) monthly. The company has raised over $130 million in funding from investors like LeapFrog Ventures and Khosla Ventures. The company also has pro-paid subscriptions with features including an AI-based meal planner, nutrition and fitness coaches, and an intelligent scale starting at $48 per month (about $4,000).
Benefits include repeated doctor consultations, metabolic panel testing, and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices available in higher tiers of the Pro plans. According to the corporation, nearly 40% of the company’s more than 200,000 subscribers pay for the Pro plan.
To find healthy eateries and meals, HealthifyMe teamed up with Indian food delivery service Swiggy in 2020. The business is already in discussions with several grocery and food delivery providers that could benefit from its technology.
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