
Show HN: Bitesnap – Deep Learning Meets Food Logging - vinayan3
https://getbitesnap.com
======
jc4p
I found your blog post (the learn more button) but I'd love more info on this
if it's available somewhere.

How does it handle differentiating different types of bread, which have
differing carbs?

How does it handle a thick layer of butter or another fat put on the sandwich
in the Avocado Toast example, which would presumably be below the visible
avocado?

A long time ago my friends and I offered a manual version of this as a service
via sending pics / emails to us and us then manually going through and
guessing. It worked well enough, so I have high hopes for a ML version!

My biggest pain point doing it manually came from pics of things like pasta
where I couldn't really guess how much oil was in the sauce.

You can definitely get far with just estimating the macronutrients from a
photo, and the absolute accuracy matters less than consistency in measurements
over time.

~~~
vinayan3
> How does it handle differentiating different types of bread, which have
> differing carbs?

We don’t nail everything yet but we allow users to refine the predictions. So
in your example we might predict bread and let the user pick the type.

> How does it handle a thick layer of butter or another fat put on the
> sandwich in the Avocado Toast example, which would presumably be below the
> visible avocado?

We don’t predict portion sizes yet. At the moment we give a sane default and
ask the users to adjust it. The next time you eat the dish we bring back the
past meal so you don't have to specify the details again. We’re hoping to
start predicting some of those details once we get enough data from our users.

Thank you for trying it out and the feedback.

~~~
danielvinson
> We don’t predict portion sizes yet. At the moment we give a sane default and
> ask the users to adjust it.

This is a serious problem. Research suggests that one of the main causes of
obesity in children is lack of ability to identify portion sizes or understand
how much to eat.

Obviously there is a market of people who understand this well and want to
track what they eat, but you are very likely going to be misleading a very
significant amount of your userbase into making worse decisions for
themselves.

~~~
vinayan3
Predicting portion size is something we’re actively looking into. One of the
reasons for getting Bitesnap out to a larger audience now is to be able to
collect more training data for doing this. We’re also experimenting with
allowing users to specify portion sizes in more natural units -- for example
by comparing a serving to the size of their fist -- and we’ll automatically
convert these to conventional units. Finally, we’re also building more
tutorials and help content into the app to educate people on better estimating
portion size (among other things).

~~~
AndrewKemendo
You might look into a custom cutting board or plate/container that has a
fiducial on it so you can measure each item. That's also another revenue
stream.

~~~
m_ke
I spent a lot of time looking for a small bluetooth food scale that I could
put under my plate but wasn't able to find anything. If I ever find some free
time I might try to make one.

Would be cool if I could pull one out from my pocket, stick it under my plate,
get a measurement then subtract whatever is left after I'm done.

------
ttcbj
Just downloaded it, the app is really elegant. Really nice work. I have used
weight watchers in the past, so here are a few thoughts:

1\. Its not totally clear to me what the goal of the app is. Is it going to
help me lose weight? Help me avoid unhealthy foods? Why am I tracking? Do I
get to choose why I am tracking? Tracking is a big commitment, so I would lead
more with what the benefit is, to motivate me to decide to track.

2\. I really love the weight watchers approach of boiling everything down to a
single point count. I have been around WW long enough to see them change the
meaning of the points to incentivize different behaviors. For example, raw
fruits and vegetables are generally zero points, even though they clearly have
calories. High sugar foods are higher in points than their calories would
suggest. I find a point system much more useful than a calorie system.

Overall, if your goal is to help people lose weight, I'd suggest you look at
what WW has been doing in their app, and also in how they have changed their
point system over the years. I actually think WW overall (including the
meetings) is an amazing system.

Interestingly, I have gotten to the point that I basically know the points of
everything I eat regularly. Originally, I loved the WW app because it was so
comprehensive, but now I just use a tiny notebook and pen. Its a lot faster
than messing with the app.

~~~
m_ke
Awesome, glad you like it.

Our goal at the moment is to focus on making the logging experience as simple
as possible. Weight loss is one of the main use cases but we have a few beta
users who are logging for health reasons, trying to improve their diet and
even a chef who’s doing it for fun.

We’d like to make the app customizable enough to fit most of those use cases.
We don’t want to push calorie counting on everyone and have an option in there
to disable the calorie and macro cards. As we add new features we’ll let users
decide if they want them to appear in their feed.

We’re considering adding a simpler point system, maybe even one that adjusts
based on your goals.

------
bmcooley
Great start for a product. I would imagine everything that's currently in your
food database had to be manually chosen due to the availability of training
data. It doesn't handle very many branded products, but that could be really
valuable in keeping users engaged and using your application daily, so I would
suggest adding barcode scanning (currently building an application with the
Nutritionix API, its got a great dataset). You could even ask your users to
take a picture of their barcode entered food so you can start learning on a
much wider variety of products. My two cents.

~~~
m_ke
Hey, thanks for the feedback.

All of our nutrition data comes from the USDA right now. We don't recognize
everything that’s in there yet but we map our predictions onto some of the
“nodes” and let people refine the predictions to a more specific item.

We don’t recognize packaged products yet but plan on doing it once we have
enough data. Barcode scanning is almost done and should make it into the app
soon.

------
AznHisoka
I wouldn't use this. It's not that I don't think your calorie count might be
right for some cases, but it won't get everything right, and when you're
trying to lose/gain weight, making sure you have accurate calorie counts is
crucial (you need measuring spoons/cups, etc).

Which is why I'm sticking with MyFitnessPal. Also, I find that although it's
tedious to keep count of calories in the beginning, once you get used to it,
it becomes a game, and even fun.

~~~
bdotdub
This feels like this fills the void between people who don't care about
calories and people who _really_ care about calories. I know people (read:
myself) who are too lazy to measure everything down the milligram and just
want an order or magnitude sense of calorie intake.

~~~
komali2
I agree that this can be useful for this use-case. Right now I'm bulking so
it's more important for me to have a general "good estimate" of my calories
and macros over a week, rather than a hyper-refined daily view, where I need a
granularity of 100 calories or I haven't lost weight that day.

For my situation, it's more about "damn, I ate 1000 calories over last week,
oh wow lol it's because I got super stoned on friday and ate half a pizza, ok,
so next week eat 2 eggs instead of 3 for breakfast to make up for it." This
app definitely wouldn't work for a cut, though, because I need my measuring
cups and spoons to do that right.

------
MintsJohn
Looks neat, but at the same time, really cumbersome. Because it looks neat,
I'd guess people will try it, because it will be cumbersome, people will
abandon it. So like many of similar fancy ai/recognition apps, i think it's
finding a problem for a solution, it's over engineered.

My problem is, taking pictures is more effort than picking an item off a list,
as current caloric counters do.

Most people eat roughly the same things on a regular basis, so they'll end up
ticking away a meal before/after you have it and be done with it, with this,
you'd be taking pictures while having your meal.

another use case is planning a day ahead, again, pics don't work here, can't
take pics ahead of time.

And of course, the result from the pics have to be corrected, so the app
learns, it seems easier to just get the item from a list immediately, without
having to take a pic first, auto completion on an input works wonders (though
of course you'd pick from a longer list)

Maybe i'm just old or not enough of a techie, or photographer, but for me
typing a short text, even on a phone, is actually faster than taking a pic.

~~~
wingerlang
> My problem is, taking pictures is more effort than picking an item off a
> list, as current caloric counters do.

How can this be? Taking a picture is at most 2 taps, if it pre-fills 90% of
your list (even 40%) it has saved you numerous taps.

------
aesthetics1
My goodness, I just started trying to use MyFitnessPal to track my food intake
and was wishing that something like this existed.

Is there a way to save prior entries as meals? I am a boring person and I eat
the same thing for breakfast 7 days a week. I would like to just add this with
one click instead of selecting: Eggs... Spinach... Oatmeal... etc.
MyFitnessPal has this and it is a great time saver.

~~~
m_ke
Hey. We recognize your past meals, so if you take a picture of something again
it will let you copy the entries.

~~~
jonas21
Just to add to what m_ke said, we do a visual search to recognize when you're
eating a meal that's the same as one you've logged before. You can copy all of
the items, including the portions and customizations that you entered before,
with one touch.

One neat thing is that our model has figured out which features are relevant
to this task -- so tomorrow, even if you eat eggs, spinach, and oatmeal in a
different container or at a different place than you did today, we can still
recognize that it's the same thing.

You can see this in action in the first shot of our demo video:

[https://youtu.be/Uw6kjbiFcNs](https://youtu.be/Uw6kjbiFcNs)

------
JTxt
I took a picture of my finished Styrofoam hot chocolate cup and straw. Hot
chocolate was the first guess. It gave an option for "from mix water added",
done. Very cool. Edit: just logged my coworker's lunch in about a minute:
Cucumber, grill cheese sandwich in one picture, it let me add them from a
list. Ramen soup took another try at a lower angle.

~~~
vinayan3
Thanks for trying the app!

------
vinayan3
Thank you for checking out Bitesnap. We really appreciate the feedback and
comments.

We have a blog post up explaining more about Bitesnap and why we built it.
[https://blog.getbitesnap.com/introducing-bitesnap-a-smart-
ph...](https://blog.getbitesnap.com/introducing-bitesnap-a-smart-photo-food-
journal-653887959cbf)

------
troyastorino
Awesome, I was just talking about how I'd want this kind of product!

I'd be more than willing to pay a monthly fee ($5 / month) for you to have
someone confirm the details of my meals and label meals that your system
doesn't recognize. I'd be happily paying you to build a higher quality
training set because

1) I don't want to fill out the extra information (although your interface
makes make that process less painful than it would be otherwise)

2) Paying would make me much more likely to be a consistent user

Anyway, excited to try it out and if you every try a paid upgrade I'll
definitely be a guinea pig :)

------
lsinger
Can you make this available on other countries' stores as well? Specifically
I'd love to see it on the German iOS AppStore.

~~~
jhurliman
UK as well, please.

------
BlakePetersen
This is great! As another diabetic, this type of software is HUGE in allowing
those of us with dietary restrictions to eat with a bit more freedom, or maybe
less anxiety. While nutrition labels are great, going out to eat means you're
often left to guess how many carbs you're intaking. Anything that provides a
more accurate assessment of my carb intake is great.

I am about to get my SCiO unit which provides a means of sampling small
amounts of food to determine the nutrition facts. The minor issue here is that
it doesn't provide much in so far as what the total amount of carbs is, only
the carb density.

I could see this product working alongside a SCiO type device that can get the
macro assessment of of food you're going to be eating, but then get the nitty
details by hooking into the SCiO data on the spot. If bread is detected,
"Please get more accurate details on your meal by sampling your bread with
your SCiO-type unit".

Great stuff! Keep it up!

------
wkirby
A few thoughts:

\- Very slick onboarding experience, especially compared to other calorie
counters. Big plus here.

\- There doesn't appear to be a way to add food outside of the current "meal."
I'm sitting here at lunch time, but wanted to add what I had for breakfast ---
instead I've just eaten a very large lunch.

\- The current database of foods seems pretty slim. No entry for my African
Peanut Soup, for example, which is available in both LoseIt and MyFitnessPal.

\- How will you deal with things like sandwiches, where many of the
ingredients may be totally hidden from view? Guess "sandwich" and let me pick
what's on it from a sensible list of sandwich ingredients? Same goes for
soups, or stews, or anything that can be visually similar with a wide range of
possible ingredients.

Over all a good start, and some much-needed innovation in the calorie-counting
app space.

~~~
m_ke
> Very slick onboarding experience, especially compared to other calorie
> counters. Big plus here.

Glad to hear that you liked it

> There doesn't appear to be a way to add food outside of the current "meal."
> I'm sitting here at lunch time, but wanted to add what I had for breakfast
> --- instead I've just eaten a very large lunch.

Yeah we had a bunch of people asking for that the past few days. We should
have that fixed in the next release.

> The current database of foods seems pretty slim. No entry for my African
> Peanut Soup, for example, which is available in both LoseIt and
> MyFitnessPal.

All of our data comes from the USDA right now. We’re going to add barcode
scanning soon and that will include another 70K items. After that we plan on
making it easier for users to add new things by OCRing the nutrition labels
and computing the nutrition values from ingredients/recipes.

> How will you deal with things like sandwiches, where many of the ingredients
> may be totally hidden from view? Guess "sandwich" and let me pick what's on
> it from a sensible list of sandwich ingredients? Same goes for soups, or
> stews, or anything that can be visually similar with a wide range of
> possible ingredients.

For more complex items we have these “builders” that let you quickly adjust
and add common ingredients to things like sandwiches, salads and soups. As we
get more data we’ll use ingredient correlations and predictions to make the
suggested additions more accurate.

The app also learns to recognize your past meals so you quickly copy the
information for meals that you eat often.

------
lostphilosopher
This is cool. When I am aware of the nutrition in my food (especially trends
over time) I eat better, but I always get sick of the tracking tool.

Putting it out there: I would pay a lot of money for a consumer tech wearable
or even implant that would track calorie consumption in the background.

~~~
m_ke
That's what we noticed as well. Calorie counting is valuable on it's own, but
we think that the biggest benefit of tracking what you eat is the awareness
that it builds up. It really helps you figure out what the weak points of your
diet are.

Having this integrated into google glass or spectacles would be great.

------
tabeth
Heh, a few years ago I thought of this same thing. I didn't know anything
about ML so I thought it'd be possible by doing the following (for food served
in a restaurant/fast-food)

1\. Tag the location (if you go to McDonalds and take a picture of a Big Mac
you'll see that you're at McDonalds and you have a picture).

2\. Then, to get your "nutrition" info you have to manually specify what
you're eating.

3\. What you're eating would then be matched to a database that would provide
the nutrition information. The picture basically would be there just to show
you what you ate.

\---

This looks WAY better than that.

~~~
m_ke
That’s another feature that we’d like to add to the app. We have a way to
match up similar looking meals so if we knew that a user is near shake shack
and had examples of their burgers we could predict the exact item.

------
mark_l_watson
Very nice!

About 10 years ago I created a cooking web site that also uses the USDA
nutrition database (cookingspace.com) and I just recently started working on
free iOS and Android apps that will use the improved analytics code that was
originally used on my site.

I am playing with the Android version of your app right now - it so far has
done a good job recognizing food items pulled out of our refrigerator. I also
like that as I take a picture that it does not add the image to my local
pictures (since these are automatically instantly backed up to OneDrive and
GDrive).

------
stratospark
Very cool! I shared a small project to demo and explain how I used
convolutional neural networks to classify food images:
[http://blog.stratospark.com/deep-learning-applied-food-
class...](http://blog.stratospark.com/deep-learning-applied-food-
classification-deep-learning-keras.html).

I'd be curious about the calorie detection. I'm wondering if it's using some
kind of weighted sum of image segmentation proportions, or doing end-to-end
deep learning.

Anyway, cool product, love to see where it goes!

~~~
m_ke
Hey, that's a really cool project.

We haven't tried going directly from image to calories yet, and I'm not sure
that we ever will. Instead the plan is to do end-to-end portion size
prediction for some of the classes. Segmentation would be cool but it's really
hard to get the data for it.

By the way, plotting images with matplotlib is a pain. Try using HTML with
base64 encoded images instead. Something like this should work:

    
    
      def base64image(path_or_image, prefix='data:image/jpeg;base64,'):
        s = BytesIO()
        get_pil_image(path_or_image).save(s, format='JPEG')
        return prefix + base64.b64encode(s.getvalue()).decode('utf-8')
    
    
      def show_images(paths_or_images, predictions=None, sz=200, urls=False):
        from IPython.core.display import display, HTML
        predictions = predictions if predictions is not None else []
        img_tags = map(lambda p: '''
          <div style="display: inline-block; margin: 2px; width: {sz}px; height: {sz}px; position: relative">
            <img src="{b}"
                 style="max-height: 100%; max-width: 100%;
                       position: absolute; left: 50%; top: 50%; transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
                       border: {bsz}px solid rgba(255, 0, 0, {pred});"/>
          </div>
          '''.format(b=p[0] if urls else base64image(p[0]), pred=1 - p[1] if p[1] is not None else 0, sz=sz, bsz=5),
                     zip_longest(paths_or_images, predictions))
        display(HTML('<div style="text-align: center">{}<div>'.format(''.join(img_tags))))

------
michaelsbradley
If this really works, consistently (i.e. within some reasonable margin of
error), Fitbit should buy this intellectual property immediately and promote
it as a way to make calorie-intake tracking dead simple.

For myself, and for many others, calorie-intake tracking was/is one of the
last hurdles jumped before weight loss/maintenance efforts really achieve
great effect. It's such a pain (time-consuming, tedious) to do it manually,
especially if you have any reasonable amount of variety in your diet.

~~~
m_ke
> For myself, and for many others, calorie-intake tracking was/is one of the
> last hurdles jumped before weight loss/maintenance efforts really achieve
> great effect. It's such a pain (time-consuming, tedious) to do it manually,
> especially if you have any reasonable amount of variety in your diet.

That's one of the main reasons why we ended up working on this. I was pretty
overweight as a teenager and lost over 60lbs in one Summer by really paying
attention to what I ate (and exercising). I tried using a few of the calorie
counting apps but they felt like a chore and really nudged me to use packaged
products since I could scan the barcode to log them.

------
LiweiZ
Food logging is a main entrance for household "ERP". If being implemented
right, there are so many potential use cases. But I guess it's easier to
extend from those chained things behind the entrance to the entrance instead
of extending from the entrance. Anyway, it's good to see there are someone
working on the hard part of food logging.

------
wmblaettler
I just logged a couple of meals with it - really like the slick interface -
it's very intuitive. One of the main things preventing me from using other
services is how clunky / frustrating they are. This is a good balance between
"close enough" and too much tedium. Nice work!

One other area of feedback - while the onboarding was slick, I felt the hours
of activity to the labeled "level" seemed a bit off. For example I do a high-
intensity workout almost every day of the week for over an hour either:
strength training or cardio and the level of activity for 7 hours per week
only put me at "lightly active" (I forget the actual terminology and cannot
restart the onboarding screens without uninstalling). I was just curious how
you came up with the activity scale.

------
fsiefken
When I read this: "We saw an opportunity to apply recent advances in image
recognition to simplify the food logging process"

do they mean CNN's for image classification and/or recognition? Does the app
estimate the distance and the portion size and if not, how feasible would that
be?

~~~
m_ke
Yeah, it’s a pretty standard conv net. Right now we’re only recognizing the
foods in the image. We’re hoping to start predicting the portion sizes for the
common foods once we get enough examples from our users.

------
Swizec
If this has MyFitnessPal integration I'll start using it immediately. Would be
great to supplement my tracking when I go out to eat. Your guess is as good as
mine, hopefully better, and much easier for me to snap a picture than do the
guessing.

Would it integrate via HealthKit perhaps?

~~~
jaegerpicker
I'd second the healthkit integration! I track all my info via healthkit, I'm a
diabetic so that includes blood glucose readings, activity, weight, and of
course food intake with carbs being the most important. Healthkit is good
(really it's just okish but it's the best we have IMO) platform for me to get
a complete view of my health information and it hugely valuable for my Doctor.

------
boxcardavin
Can you describe your training or dataset you used?

~~~
m_ke
It's a convolutional neural net that's very similar to the one that won
ImageNet last year. We're doing standard preprocessing with opencv and
training the net in theano. Dataset is a mix of images we got from our beta
users and stuff that's openly available on the web.

------
kriro
I think the food-id code can be used for more stuff if it works. I always
wanted to snap a picture of my refrigerator and have my available food updated
in some database. Then hook it up to some recipe database and we're talking
(you cold cook X,Y,Z with what's available or if you'd buy A,B,C...integrate
that with some food delivery service to monetize).

I'm suspecting this is a concierge MVP of sorts...if not consider me quite
impressed. The last time I checked food identification (or portion sizes
really) was a fairly hard problem. Edit: Guess the food identification isn't
that hard anymore. Yikes times are moving fast :D

~~~
joshvm
There's an example of this kind of classification in the Faster R-CNN paper.
Microsoft's implementation actually give a fridge as the example:

[https://github.com/Microsoft/CNTK/wiki/Object-Detection-
usin...](https://github.com/Microsoft/CNTK/wiki/Object-Detection-using-Fast-R-
CNN)

------
wmblaettler
Love this for prepared meals and home cooked meals, where you need to analyze
the ingredients of a dish. Have you considered adding the ability to recognize
a standard FDA Nutrition facts label as well? For example if I have a protein
bar, it would be great to snap a picture of the label and OCR the macros. I
know that differs though from your current tech of a CNN for image analysis,
but it would round out the product to cover a greater percent of foods eaten.

~~~
m_ke
Yeah, it’s actually something that we played with already. I have a basic
prototype of it working and might be able to get it into the app in the next
few months. It should really reduce the friction of adding new items. At some
point we’d like to start recognizing packaged products but we’ll need the data
to make it work.

I mentioned this here as well:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/5ol7od/d_w...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/5ol7od/d_who_is_using_machine_learning_and_ai_to_do_cool/dckiehu/)

------
imranq
I love the idea and the technology and design seems great! However, I found
out that I save way more time and am more effective just sticking to a few
basic principles of eating food instead of tracking everything. Slow-carb diet
where I eat no bread until one cheat day a week - works so far!

The benefit of pictures seems to be that I'm forced to think about what I am
eating before chowing down.

------
AndrewKemendo
I've been using it all day and have the following feedback.

1\. I like the design, and it works very cleanly. Nothing appears to be heavy,
and the UI is intuitive.

2\. It only does one thing - track food. I think this is it's biggest
strength. It doesn't do fitness or anything else right now, which it
shouldn't.

3\. The default goal to lose weight is simple to use and I think captures the
predominant use case - by calorie reduction. I think the goal breakdown with
consumed/remaining should be the most prominent UI element on top with the
breakdown by calorie type being second. Having the challenge details (# meals
X days) at the top isn't data I need each time I open the app. I can see why
that would be a design challenge.

4\. I have only used it a day so I can't say how well or not it displays
trends about calories/nutrition over time, but I know that I would like to be
able to break things down more.

5\. The biggest challenge I think you have is with CV. Correct me if I am
wrong, but my guess is that you are trying to use users to do reinforcement
learning on your Deep Vision Nets. I am a Deep Vision guy myself (which is why
I downloaded it by the way) and my guess is that you are going to have a hard
time doing training this way. Here is why:

A. If the results of the object classification are good enough to always be
result #1 (because it's obvious you are using a probabilistic return set
(imagenet?)) then over time people will be annoyed at having to select the
object/food in addition to taking the picture.

B. If the results are not good, then people will get annoyed with having to
take the picture AND ALSO enter the food type. They will just resort to
entering it manually each time. For example I made vegetable curry for dinner,
and didn't take a photo because I knew it wouldn't know what it was.

So as a result, your training set will stagnate and won't learn any better
than if you did it with a team of people. If you want it to really learn
you're going to have to incentivize or force people to always take a picture
and always tag it. Even better if you can have them bound each item right?!

By the way, crowd sourcing Machine Vision training is I think the right way to
do things (that's what we do with interior home objects FYI).

I look forward to seeing iteration here. Best of luck.

~~~
m_ke
Hey, thanks for the thoughtful response.

We're not doing any reinforcement learning, we just fine tune the net as we
get more data (and occasionally train from scratch when we add a lot of new
classes).

In regards to (A), we plan to start skipping the selection steps for
predictions that we're really confident in and will just add them by default.
I think once we have enough data we might even be able to predict what users
will eat before they take a picture. I eat practically the same thing for
breakfast every day of the week so it could just log it for me without
requiring me to do any work. Same goes for things like coffee shops, we don't
ask for location right now but if you always get the same thing when you walk
into a coffee shop, we could just log it for you based on the fact that you
were there.

B. We keep track of our predictions and what users end up logging so we can
tell what our weaknesses are. When we train new models we prioritize the
weakly performing classes, especially if they're popular among our users.

------
aembleton
Awesome, I've just tried it with an Apple and it worked!

Can you let me enter my height and weight in metric please as I had to use
Google to convert.

~~~
vinayan3
Thank you for trying the app and the feedback. We will add metric units for
entering your details.

------
mrleinad
"This app is incompatible with all of your devices".. :( I have a Note 4. What
sort of device do I need?

~~~
domas
This is probably due to contry restrictions. I get the same "incompatible with
all your devices" on the website, but "This item is not available in your
country" in Google Play app.

~~~
mszcz
Same here. What's up with the country restrictions?

~~~
universemaster
Yes, I'm in the United Kingdom and getting the same message.

------
aembleton
I'm in the UK and managed to install it without any issues other than the
measurements all being imperial.

------
narutouzumaki
From the looks and description it looks very interesting to me, would love to
try it - however I am unable to install it on Android. Currently in a European
country (also connected via Swiss VPN), might this be one of the reasons? Is
there any reasons you might have geofenced it for now?

------
aaronpk
Is there an API? Can I export my data?

I'd be interested in using this if I can get the data out. I've been posting
everything I eat and drink to my own website for the past few years, sometimes
with photos sometimes just text. I'd love to have a better workflow for doing
that!

~~~
m_ke
We don't have an API yet but we'll add a way to share/export your history at
some point in the next few months.

------
rogermedia
Very cool gonna check it out. Have used Calorie Count in the past but input
was the main drawback there.

I noticed that the image of the phone with app on the homepage takes a few
seconds to load on a mobile connection. Might want to optimize that for faster
loading.

------
ppas
I made something like this last year [https://devpost.com/software/picknic-
ym5txf](https://devpost.com/software/picknic-ym5txf)

It was just clarafai -> keyword search in USDA database -> log though.

Looks cool!

~~~
jonas21
Nice work! The Clarifai API is pretty awesome.

------
muzster
Sounds like an amazing product - would love to try it here in the UK.

It might help to add a mail subscribing list to your website to capture early
oversea adopters.

Does the app allow you to take a picture of the aftermath to account for the
unconsumed left overs ?

~~~
m_ke
Good idea! We had a beta signup form up there before but just took it down
today. We might bring that back for people outside of the states.

We don't predict portion sizes yet. We could try adding that once we do.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Please do. Otherwise I shall be forced to side-load your app, and I'd prefer
to get it through Google Play (seriously, I have wanted this product for a
long time).

~~~
m_ke
Hey, add your email here
[https://goo.gl/forms/ZP2bQOL5aCS1NjlR2](https://goo.gl/forms/ZP2bQOL5aCS1NjlR2)
and we'll invite you to our beta group.

------
overcast
Ok, this just seems a bit unbelievable. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

~~~
vinayan3
Hey overcast, you can download the app on the App Store or Google Play and try
it out for yourself. Let us know what you think!

------
evolve2k
App Store telling me the app is not currently available in Australia.

I'm guessing there is nothing specifically US centric in the app, any chance
of opening up region support and sharing the love with your mates down under?

~~~
m_ke
If you're still interested in trying it out add your email to this list
[https://goo.gl/forms/ZP2bQOL5aCS1NjlR2](https://goo.gl/forms/ZP2bQOL5aCS1NjlR2)
and we'll send you a beta invite.

------
joepour
Hey this looks great - but this is what I see in Australia:
[http://imgur.com/H62UBYE](http://imgur.com/H62UBYE) when I search the
appstore.

~~~
m_ke
Yeah that sucks. If you'd still like to try it out you can sign up here
([https://goo.gl/forms/WQ2VOJwRsn9yWTfC3](https://goo.gl/forms/WQ2VOJwRsn9yWTfC3))
to get a beta invite.

~~~
joepour
Thanks - submitted!

------
Jonovono
How realistic is it that you could create something that gets attached to your
stomach and is constantly monitoring your food?

Cool service btw. I remember a company that did this with Mechanical Turk lol.

~~~
sebleon
More likely: subdermal implant that monitors nutrients in your blood.

------
partycoder
I actually had this same idea about a year ago. A dietitian I know and told me
it would be very hard to infer calories just from a picture, so I did not
pursue the idea.

------
amingilani
I'd love to switch to using this full time but why isn't available in my
country (Pakistan)? I currently use Lifesum to track what I eat.

~~~
m_ke
I just made a beta signup form for people that aren't in north america. If you
sign up we'll just add you to testflight or our android beta.

[https://goo.gl/forms/WQ2VOJwRsn9yWTfC3](https://goo.gl/forms/WQ2VOJwRsn9yWTfC3)

~~~
Kiro
Why have this restriction at all? No-one cares about localization in my
country (Sweden). Just give us exactly how it works in the US and 99% will be
happy.

------
ClassyJacket
Unavailable in Australia. Weird, because this is the one way of logging food
that _doesn 't_ differ between countries.

~~~
jonas21
We're being a little bit cautious in expanding beyond the US at the moment
because commonly eaten foods and preparation methods can vary a lot between
countries. We also don't support metric serving sizes yet. Hopefully, we'll be
able to support Australia soon!

~~~
StreakyCobra
It would be nice to at least provide a way to try it outside US/CA, like
giving a link to an APK here, especially because it's a «Show HN» what means
you want to show your product to this community. I wouldn't be too concerned
about negative reviews as A) non-hackers will not find this link and will not
know how to install it anyway; and B) most people here would be smart enough
to understand it's a prototype that is currently limited to one culinar
culture, if you explain it while providing the link. This would avoid the
frustration that probably more than half of the people are having here when
wanting to try your app.

It looks damn cool, but I'm really sad to not being able to try it just
because I don't have the right IP address :-(

~~~
m_ke
Hey, that's a great idea. I just made a beta signup form for anyone who'd like
to try it out.

[https://goo.gl/forms/WQ2VOJwRsn9yWTfC3](https://goo.gl/forms/WQ2VOJwRsn9yWTfC3)

We'll just add you to testflight or google play beta.

~~~
bjornstar
I would have installed your app if you didn't have region restrictions, now
I'm not going to bother.

------
Katrijnvb
Looks amazing - but is itpossible that you vannot download is in Europe
(Belgium- - did not find it in google play store.

------
eva1984
How accurate does this predict...carbs? And how does it handle the different
amount? Like different cup size?

------
imh
How accurate is the calorie count? And out of academic curiousity, how did you
validate the calorie counts?

------
moufestaphio
Seems pretty neat so far.

Only imperial units though :(

~~~
vinayan3
We’re initially targeting the US market, and it was easiest to get serving
data in imperial units to start. We are planning to add sensible serving sizes
in metric units as soon as we can.

------
laxc
Great start!

------
apathy
How's it compare to HungryBot from infinome?

------
mbrain
Why its not available for all countries?

