With new AI models, health tracking companies have realized that they can now provide insights using both structured and unstructured data. The new goal is to create interfaces and modalities that make it easier for users to create a habit of logging their meals or workouts, along with having an ever-present AI assistant that can guide people in areas like nutrition and exercise.
Khosla-backed health startup Healthify on Tuesday launched a new version of its health assistant Ria, which you can converse with live, via voice, and by using the camera for getting input about your food.
The startup is using OpenAI’s tech to power this conversational mode. With this release, Ria supports more than 50 languages, including 14 Indian languages. The company said that it can also support mixed language input like Hinglish or Spanglish. While the company is largely utilizing OpenAI’s models for this release, it said that in the future it could use other models if needed.
Image Credits: Healthify
Through the new version of Ria, users can ask for their health overview for specified time frames like day, week, or month, or an overall summary. The app can pull data from different sources like fitness trackers, sleep trackers, or glucose monitors to give users insights about exercise, sleep, readiness, and glucose spikes, and give suggestions.
Just like Google Gemini’s Live Conversation mode, you can point the camera to ask about different food items and their nutritional value, then log them.
Healthify also showed off a demo of using Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to converse with Ria in real time and use the device’s camera to log food.
The startup believes its users will feel more comfortable chatting in real time with an assistant. Plus, they can do multiple things in one session, such as getting insights, generating an exercise plan, or logging their goals. If you forget to log your food for the day, you can describe your meals in one go instead of typing them out, and the assistant will log them for you.
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What’s more, the company is looking to utilize its updated AI in more places. In the coming months, it plans to make the conversational assistant a central piece of user onboarding so it can gather more insights from unstructured conversations. (Notably, new-age dating apps have opted for this kind of interface to create better matches for users.)
The startup is also creating a more persistent memory layer over OpenAI’s models and its assistant to have the app remember long-term context around preferences and health changes to give more personalized suggestions.
Healthify is also making the assistant available in conversations with your coach or nutritionist to help either of you pull data or answer your questions when they are not available. Plus, it’s adding Ria to your calls with coaches and nutritionists so it can transcribe the calls for insights. Users or coaches can also ask Ria for data while they are on a call.
The company’s CEO, Tushar Vashisht, said that the team trained Ria on years of conversational data between coaches and users to give grounded and accurate advice.
Apart from Healthify, other apps like Alma, Cal AI, MyfitnessPal, and Ladder have created ways for users to input food intakes using voice, text, or images. Healthify believes that with its live conversation mode, data aggregation from various platforms, and AI trained on years of data, it has an edge over its competitors. What’s more, the company has added a way to access your gallery and automatically detect food photos to give you options for adding meals that you might have missed logging in.
“We are focusing on creating a health ecosystem of nutrition-driven data with other integrations. From an AI perspective, we are putting in levers to solve for accountability in users when it comes to health,” the company’s CPO Paritosh Kumar told TechCrunch.
Healthify, which has more than 45 million registered users and a few million active monthly users, is also launching a new AI plan in the U.S with updated Ria assistant and meal planning at $20 per month. Prior to this, the company had been testing various plans with text-based AI and certified nutrition coaches.
The company said it’s hoping to soon announce partnerships around its GLP-1-aided weight loss programs. In the coming months, Healthify also plans to partner with health tracking device companies to bring their data into Ria.
Vashisht said the company may raise a new funding round in the near future, given its strong U.S. adoption and growth.
