My wife and I recently started following the "30 plants a week" protocol for gut microbiome diversity. We found that the biggest friction wasn't the diet itself, but the manual tracking. We tried Excel and Notes, but deduplicating ingredients across meals manually was tedious and led to us dropping the habit.
I built a Telegram bot to automate this.
How it works:
You send a photo of your meal (or a voice note).
It uses an LLM (Vision) to extract ingredients.
It filters for plants and checks against your history for the current week to count only unique plants.
It suggests what to add next to increase diversity.
I also added a visual feedback loop: a virtual plant generates and grows based on your unique plant score (my wife is a florist, so this was a necessary UX feature).
I am planning to shift it towards gamification more so people can have a game to develop a healthy habit. For this, I will be aiming at mobile app.
It’s currently an MVP. I'm curious to hear your feedback on the extraction accuracy and the interaction flow.
Link to the bot: https://t.me/flora_quest_bot