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GPT Food Cam — Log your food with AI
GPT Food Cam is the simplest food logger and calorie counter for iOS and it's 100% Free. Take a picture, post it to your feed and see an estimated calorie range.
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Oh cool! Those apps are so annoying to use. I recall many years ago there were a few apps that tried to do this but of course ML is a lot better now.
For about 6 months once I took a picture of everything I ate - that by itself (even without analysis) was helpful to make more intentional eating decisions.
Hey @mobileraj thats look amazing and can simplify the way how people track their calories 💪🏻
It says "will estimate the calories". How accurate is the calculation? What is the average deviation?
Congratulations on the launch 🚀.
@crebuh We use an AI model to estimate the calories similar to a ChatGPT. It's not perfect by any means but it continues to get better. To help address some of the inaccuracy, we display the calorie results as a range vs a specific number.
Unfortunately, I don't have an average standard deviation. Sometimes it's wildly accurate and sometimes it's pretty off. I have found in these instances, adding a hint text can make a big difference. The biggest issue which I think is hard for the AI to discern is the portion size. I photographed a full pizza the other day but it can't readily tell if that's a small or a XL pizza and so you end-up with a number close to a medium unless you add a hint.
Fortunately though, as mentioned earlier, the AI is getting better so we should assume that the calorie range estimate will only improve over the coming months.
Very good! If you could add a recipe recommendation feature or a community function, I think it would help more people with similar eating habits.
Hey Raj,
Do you have any plans to improve the accuracy of the AI for specific types of foods, like home-cooked meals or exotic cuisines?
Congrats on the launch!
@kyrylosilin So we use an AI model called Gemini Flash which is from Google. If you're not familiar, you can think of it like ChatGPT. I have generally found that as long as the photo is at a good angle and the food item isn't lathered with hot sauce or other, it does a pretty good job providing a calorie range. You can always add a text hint and this may improve the result. The models themselves are continuing to improve so we should assume that over the coming months, the accuracy will only get better.
Very original and interesting idea. It would be great to be able to add your own custom general prompt (like the one you added about food having oil, butter etc...) if someone has a particular diet. For instance I am vegan, so I always use replacements (so even if my burger looks like yours it probably doesn't have the same calories) and instead of adding a hint on each picture, specifying at the user-level could be helpful?
@annedevj So I considered this, basically a section in Settings called "Background" or "Eating habits" but I found the result to not improve that much so ultimately didn't include this. What I found to work better was to provide a wider range. So yes, it prob will always be on the high side for your food items but my intent really to drive the habit of food logging through simplicity than an extreme focus on the precise calorie value. My general feeling is if a user wants that, then they should probably go use something like a MyFitnessPal because they likely will need to enter exactly what they eat with serving sizes etc.
Hey Raj, this looks super interesting yet useful. The UI is also very clean and modern, I will definitely use it myself and recommend to my friends as well.
It's a great idea! But how accurate is it? For example, with a burger, it would be impossible to determine what cheese or patty was used just from a picture, right? Anyway, this is a good first step. Congratulations on your launch!
@venkatesh_reddy17 Answered this with a few other comments. Yes, it is impossible from simply a photo so GPT Food Cam returns a calorie range versus a specific number.
Hi @mobileraj, congratulations on the launch! 🚀 I love how simple and streamlined the app experience feels. I’m curious about your decision to use Google Gemini Flash—did you explore other models as well? What led you to choose Gemini?
@sylvain_zircher Well, there are only a finite number of multi-modal models to choose from. We did start with GTP-4o-mini and that worked fine. We ultimately chose Gemini Flash b/c it's about 1/2 the cost in terms of tokens for processing images and b/c we're making this app free, cost vs ads to keep the app at break-even is important. GPT-4o-mini might have been negligibly better but it was hard to tell with my daily food logging.
Neat to see some positive coverage of GPT Food Cam today, really happy if we can help make healthier lives (and for free!)
https://thespoon.tech/ive-seen-t...
Struggles with calorie counting apps, this seems like a good! Love the simplicity of just taking a photo and getting a quick estimate. I can see this being a good for me who want to log my food easily without the hassle of manual entry.
This is such a neat idea! to snap a quick photo and get a calorie estimate is super convenient. Perfect for keeping track of meals without much effort.
I've been looking for an easy way to track my meals, and this is exactly what I needed! The design looks straightforward, and I appreciate that you don’t overcomplicate the process. Wishing you all the best with this launch!
Really cool product! I was looking for this. I used to track my intake with ean barcodes but it was just a hassle
Congrats on the launch!
I just tried it, and I love how easy it is to get started!
Quick question: are you planning to add more information beyond calories? I’d love to see an estimation of the nutritional intake, maybe with a weekly report, and even recommendations for the following week!
Either way, congrats again and thank you for making it free!
@morgane_prr So my experience has been, the minute you want macros like protein, fat and more, you probably want precision and so for that, I suggest things like MyFitnessPal where you have to type in specifically what you're eating with serving sizes and more. With GPT Food Cam, I wanted it to be super simple and I didn't want a ton of focus on the calorie number (it's a range). In my opinion, it's really about creating the behavior of food logging. In some ways, I'm trying to make something for the 95% that find using MyFitnessPal or other to be too tedious. With this audience, if they just simply use GPT Food Cam as their diary, everybody wins.
So full circle, although the AI has details like macros, we're not currently planning to expose it but we may revisit that in the future.
This app has so much potential! Any plans to expand to Android or offer support in more countries?
@jahanzaib_ara I talk a little bit about that here: www.gptfoodcam.com. This was a summer hobby project that I built with Ben in lieu of his summer internship. Ben is considering porting to Android depending on how classes go this Fall so I don't have a definitive answer but maybe on Android. It was built in React Native so it shouldn't be too hard.
Regarding more countries, it is available in ~28 countries based on Admob's ad monetization. Once we have a better baseline on how much ad revenue can be made from the Instagram style ad in the food photo feed, we can expand to more countries. We just want to make sure the ads can cover the cost of the AI calorie lookup because GPT Food Cam is totally free!
This is great product, it can help tracking calories while eating out so much :) I'm just wondering - usually restaurants can use a lot of oil/butter etc. which is not that visible. Is it taken for consideration and done any average, or how the app can try estimate that?
@anna_hanusova It's by no means perfect but the prompt I use behind the scenes with the AI model includes that "food often have oil, butter, other sauces etc..." and that the "range should accommodate for that." All that said, it's not perfect, it's AI but it continues to get better and as mentioned in my intro comment, I made the app so easy that we hope the focus is really to create a behavior of food logging with less focus on the numbers. I logged with a food coach for 9 months and I realized that just simply taking the picture is 95% of the way there so if you accomplish that, you're definitely on your way to more "mindful" eating.
GPT Food Cam