AI-powered Personal Food Assistant

Today’s AI assistants help users with their everyday questions and curiosity, their commutes, and their product purchases. Despite the wide range of services, a neglected aspect, which consumes a large part of our everyday life,  is food. According to American Time Use Survey, Americans spend on average 1.18 hours per day in eating and drinking activities. More important than the time spent on food, what we eat is central to our health. An unhealthy food habit is likely to result in overweight, undernourished body conditions, and increase the risk of the development of nutrition-related diseases. However, we have not seen much investment on personalized AI assistants for healthy food choices.

Albeit the lack of AI assistant for food, there are still hundreds of apps focusing on various aspects of food industry:

• Apps such as Instagram and Pinterest encourage users to take food pictures and share them with friends. Furthermore, these apps increase user retention with social features, such as likes and comments on pictures.
• Apps such as GrubHub, Doordash, and UberEATS that focus on food delivery and catering side of the business.
• Apps such as Yummly that provide food recipes to the users.
• Apps such as MyFitnessPal and LoseIt that focus on food calorie counting, health and fitness.
• Apps such as Yelp and Zagat that target restaurant hunting and rating business.

I believe that the next multi-billion dollar question is how to create an AI food assistant that can provide all these services in a one-stop solution. I believe such a personal food assistant should be capable of the following:

• Identify food ingredients, measure the serving food size, and precisely estimate the food’s nutrition information;
• Track user’s food intake, measure user’s daily calorie and nutrition content;
• Learn about user’s personal preferences such as favorite foods, preferred dining time, preferred group of social friends at lunch and dinner, etc;
• Provide daily suggestions about meals, recipes, restaurants, lifestyle, etc.;
• Share food related-information with friends on their favorite social networks.

Moving towards this space, I wrote an iPhone app called Zucchini that uses AI to classify the type of the food you eat and help you count your daily calorie intake. Furthermore, it measures the amount of protein, vitamin, carbs, fiber and minerals in the food. In addition to the AI system, it provides barcode scanning, weight tracking, step counting, and sharing food images and content on social media as well as inside the app.