| Release Date | March 31, 2023 at 7am PST |
|---|---|
| App Store Link | https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foodnoms/id1479461686 |
| Contact | Ryan Ashcraft, Designer and Developer |
| mailto:[email protected] | |
| Compatibility | iPhones and iPads running iOS/iPadOS 15.1 or later |
| Macs running macOS 12.1 or later | |
| Price | Free with optional subscription |
| https://twitter.com/food_noms | |
| Mastodon | https://mastodon.social/@foodnoms |
Tracking what you eat has never been easier, thanks to the wonders of AI. Introducing "Ask AI" – a new FoodNoms feature powered by ChatGPT that enables you to magically look up virtually any food using natural language.
Powered by ChatGPT, Ask AI is a new FoodNoms feature that allows you to track food by entering virtually any food, or combination of foods, in natural language – making food tracking easier than ever.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/rA0xdnSKt7k
Logging everything you eat can be tedious. For every single thing you eat, you have to go through multiple screens to search for a food item and enter in how much you ate.
How Ask AI helps: You can enter in multiple items and amounts with natural language. For example: "a half an apple, a celery stick, and two cookies"
Translating amounts to specific units is confusing. How many oz/grams are in a handful of nuts? People don't have food scales with them wherever they go.
How Ask AI helps: You can enter in non-scientific amounts like "handfuls" or "bowls" or "plates". For example: "a handful of nuts".
Logging what you eat when eating out at a restaurant is particularly tedious. Guessing and searching for each ingredient, estimating the appropriate amounts, adds up to be super exhausting. You also aren't sure if what you're tracking is even remotely correct, so you lose confidence in your numbers.
How Ask AI helps: You can enter in plates and dishes as you would describe them to a friend, or how it's described on a menu. For example: "an open-faced sandwich with roast beef, lettuce, tomato and a side salad with balsamic dressing"
Finding exotic dishes and foods from unpopular brands or restaurants can be challenging. Often you need to Google search for the answer, because it’s simply not popular enough to be in the normal food database.
How Ask AI helps: You can search for anything, including branded and exotic plates. For example: "waffle house all star special plate" or "Moroccan chicken tagine bowl"
Other apps have offered natural language input capabilities for years. Ask AI is different, thanks to the wonders of LLMs and ChatGPT.
Ask AI does a better job interpreting queries by being less opinionated about the input syntax and better understanding the true user intent. It does a better job handling queries for branded foods and uncommon items.
Automation enthusiasts can build custom Shortcuts that take advantage of this new functionality.
Here’s a simple example Shortcut that prompts for arbitrary input, then proceeds to log each of the resulting items generated by the AI:
