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by jraines 379 days ago
The benefit of AI as a feature in calorie counting apps is great. But you have to track stuff manually for a while to realize the benefit. Specifically: using AI for restaurant meals is a convenient starting point, from which you use your hard-won feel for weight & caloric density of things to tweak the first pass to something closer to the mark.

As of now I would not at all trust a fully AI calorie counting app
2 comments
marcellus23 379 days ago
This is exactly correct. I find AI in my food tracking app (FoodNoms) to be really useful, but no, you cannot rely on it on its own. You always have to tweak the results to match what you feel in your gut (no pun intended) the counts should be. Interestingly, very similar situation to using AI for code: you shouldn't just blindly trust what it puts out, but if you know what you're doing, it can save you a lot of time.
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wnorris510 379 days ago
100%. You should not trust photo based calorie tracking and should only use it when there is no other realistic choice (e.g. eating out).

You especially should not trust an app that does not do any research on the accuracy of it's algorithm or claims to be "consistently accurate" as many of them do currently. The truth is these algorithms have the potential to be accurate when values are averaged out over the long term, but dish to dish they will have occasionally wildly inaccurate results.

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sumeno 379 days ago
> You especially should not trust an app that does not do any research on the accuracy of it's algorithm or claims to be "consistently accurate" as many of them do currently.

Your website says:

> SnapCalorie is the first app where you can take a picture of any meal and get an accurate calorie count and nutrition in seconds.

So which is it? Can you get an accurate calorie count of a meal from a picture or not?

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