These apps look gimmicky but they are growing like crazy. CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr. I’m hoping that some people really find value in these apps and that they are not just a pure marketing driven play.

Gimmicky my ass. I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively. It’s the easiest and most no nonsense way I have found to record this information. Since it’s all on the same thread it always outputs the data in the same format and I can ask it for information over custom time ranges on the fly. I’ve also uploaded the nutritional labels for all my protein shakes and supplements to the same thread so I can just say “I had my nighttime shake” and it knows what I am talking about immediately.

I like how in the article the author includes the instructions for Cal AI: - Include a reference object (like a coin or your hand) for scale And then the screenshots show just a pictures of bowls of food with no reference objects at all.

Honestly curious if that would have improved the author's experience.

I prefer efficient manual entry to vibe-coding calories. I built my own Java-based SPA: https://frequal.com/cf/

It's local-first so you control this sensitive information. It features easy reuse and exercise tracking.

Weird article, it mentions three apps at the beginning, doesn't even test two of them in favor of two others it didn't mention, and then declares all the apps failures.

Funny, I was just discussing this on HN a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892

There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.

Maybe in aggregate they are fine if the noise is unbiased and you do some things like correct it when it says an apple is tikka masala, but yeah, someone using this and lying to themselves about the calorie content of junk/comfort food seems pretty likely.

I work for a company that offers nutrition tracking on an app in the App Store.

We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier.

We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate.

We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be generally correct. The math was usually within a margin of error of 5%. This was acceptable except that… there was no micronutrient values and you couldn’t really adjust the portions at all. The system just dumps the macros and while you can halve something… the user experience isn’t great.

Ultimately, if you want precision: manual entry is the only way to go. I feel like out approach will end up being very great once we work out the kinks. Our search isn’t spectacular and as a team we are learning a lot of about prompt engineering and how to make best use of the AI.

I've had pretty good results using the AI features in Macrofactor. It's certainly not perfect, but it does a pretty good job with mixed text and photos and allows you to easily fine-tune the results.

Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.

I’ve tried a few AI-powered calorie tracking tools too. At first it felt super convenient, just take a photo and get the numbers. But over time I kept seeing mistakes. Sometimes it would even tag a salad as soup. Eventually I went back to the old way. Fewer photos, more mindful eating. Honestly I feel better that way.

I genuinely can’t understand why anyone would even TRY using these apps. Of course they’re going to be terrible, but how could anyone with a modicum of intelligence suspect otherwise?

The founder of parrotpal (another AI calorie tracking app, supporting both text and photos) points out that using photos is one of the least accurate ways for tracking food: https://www.instagram.com/parrot.pal/reel/DAB9NtfM250/

Users also seem to like using photos less than text for food tracking: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBoSeQzM3bQ/

The author of this article seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too, but calorie counting does work well for many people. They also bring up intuitive eating as an alternative, but intuitive eating is not intended for weight loss while that's what calorie tracking is usually used for (though it can also be used for maintenance and for weight gain).

Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating. There are a few times when I need to adjust it, I mostly try to overestimate. It's not perfectly accurate but it gives me enough accuracy to have successfully lost and kept my weight off.

As a gym enthusiast, if this app can’t give me accurate calorie counts and nutrient data, it’s basically useless to me. But for the average person, this is a big deal because we tend to seek convenience and want the easiest path to our goals. If this app wants to truly deliver results, it still has a long way to go.

Fun fact: The founder of Cal AI is just 18 years old.

If you want calorie counting to be of any value to you you're going to want to be accurate. Thankfully we're mostly creatures of habit. Source accurate numbers for everything you eat in a week and you're 90% covered for every other week. I recorded 30 items over two weeks and then added 15 more over 2.5 months. Don't sabotage your efforts with tools that don't work.

Yeah cal AI is the worst of them all