[jurgenkesker]

Yes, I would think that would work better indeed. As a augmentation or help tool. I would love to be able to say to MyFitnessPal that 'I ate this and that food, same as usual, and oh yeah drank this.' Just as a easier input interface. I wouldn't trust a pure AI solution without some proper database behind it.

[nvahalik]

Yeah. The big problem is that "augmentation" is hard because we (humans) have an internal process for how we think about things that is hard to define and building a flowchart for how we understand foods doesn't even necessarily capture things. Very well. You can take something like "chocolate chip pancakes" where the context can be "<brand> <item>" or "<modifier> <food item>". And then you can search.

But even though we've integrated it with a good food database, the process of searching isn't great because sometimes things like brand names don't get recognized and/or modifiers may get confused because... is it a brand? Is it a way of preparing something?

Ultimately we are working on improving how our search works by not just searching by the name, but by getting information about brand, the product, and possible serving options as well. These would better inform the search and allow us to, say, fallback without a brand if we can't find the brand.

The other problem has to do with variant detection. I can say "kirkland sous vide egg bites" but there are 3-4 variants of them. And right now most databases are just "here is the item you requested" without looking at possible variants, which is a problem that we are going to end up solving ourselves.

It's been interesting because we've learned a lot about how people "think" it should work vs. how it actually works.