Show HN: Track your calories easily by saying what you ate

[paul_brook]

Hi guys,

I created this app to solve one of my own problems: I found calorie tracking to be a real pain.

Now, instead of scanning barcodes, scrolling through lists, or taking photos of food, I just speak into my phone (or computer), tell Calorio what I’ve eaten, and it handles the rest. It uses OpenAI’s APIs to process audio and map foods to calories.

It’s free to use without an account, but if you want it to tally daily calories and remember everything you’ve eaten, you’ll need to sign up with your Google account and subscribe (you get 7 days for free).

I would really appreciate any feedback; please let me know if you have any questions, issues or suggestions.

Thank you! Paul.

[sphars]

Getting the exact calories for a food that doesn't have a nutrition label/barcode (so basically any homemade dish) has been the bane of my repeated attempts to track calories. So this could be great for me. However, I'm not a fan of talking into my phone and granting those permissions. Any chance to try it out by typing my foods?

Can we export our data at all? Also, do you have a privacy policy? Edit: found the privacy policy at https://calorio.xyz/privacy through the About page

[paul_brook]

Hey there, thank you for trying it out. Having the text box is a great idea and we will implement that and let you know here in the comments when it's ready. You can't export data at the moment, but if that's something that people want then we can certainly implement it. Thank you for the feedback!

[gardenhedge]

Had you considered text input before this comment?

[paul_brook]

We had considered it, but we wanted to get some feedback from people before implementing any new features.

[not_your_vase]

Related comment, though not directly to the app: I do calorie tracking also, but my biggest pain is figuring out the actual calories - lately I found that most of these nutritional labels are rubbish, and as reliable as your average politician.

I wonder if OpenAI has a better track record than the average shelf in my supermarket, and if yes, how they did it...

[paul_brook]

That's a great point, and one that most people are unaware of. The calories on the back of the food should come with a +/- uncertainty. People think they are accurate but they are allowed to be inaccurate without certain limits.

For most people, getting a rough idea is sufficient I think and much better than not tracking at all.

[acangiano]

Pretty cool but unfortunately it’s wildly inaccurate. I said “two chicken breasts and lots of green beans”. It estimated 262 kcal. The “actual” calories were 754 kcal. Specifying the actual grams was better, of course, but still off by quite a bit.

[paul_brook]

I'm a little confused. If I search online the calories in a chicken breast, the first thing I see is 128 calories per chicken breast (https://www.verywellfit.com/how-many-calories-in-chicken-bre...). The number of calories in green beans is relatively small and so 262 seems like a good estimate. How large were the chicken breasts?

[acangiano]

The chicken breasts were fairly large 386g cooked (so even more raw). 315g of green beans. When I provided the grams it did better but was still off by 250+ calories (I’m guessing it ignored me mentioning that that was cooked weight.) It’s a cool tool and it can be useful but if you’re not careful you’ll run into some very inaccurate guesstimates. One way to improve accuracy would be for the system to learn from previous logs (both in the system and previous apps.)

[uthpala89]

This is an awesome app! Do you plan on adding macros to this? I would definitely be using it if it had that feature.

[paul_brook]

Thanks for trying it out - really glad you like it! Yes we will be adding macros very shortly :)

[uthpala89]

Thank you!

[cwbuilds]

I've been using this for a few days and really like it. Plus 1 for macros

[paul_brook]

Thank you so much for trying it out and for the feedback! Macros are certainly high on the to-do list :)

[laksmanv]

this is neat. you should check out macrofactor, they have an option like this that uses voice to text and AI to suggest items.

[paul_brook]

Glad you like it :) I'll check out your suggestion too thank you!