Manually logging every thing we eat throughout the day can be time consuming. And while we have every intention to use that calorie counting app, it isn't before long before we stop using it consistently.
But there now is a more simple way for users to keep track of a food diary. In fact, it's as easy as chatting to a friend—or in this case, to a bot.
Meet Forksy, the chatbot for tracking calories and eating healthy that available for Facebook Messenger and other messaging apps like Viber, Kik and Telegram.
Think of it as speaking directly to a nutritionist who knows exactly how much calories, fat, protein, fiber, etc. each meal consumed has, who then adds food into a digital diary for you.
The best part is that unlike nutrition and food tracking apps already out there, Forksy allows users to speak to it in their natural language to log their food.
For example, the user can tell Forksy they had a cup of coffee and bagel with cream cheese for breakfast, and the bot will bring the nutritional info for those items. Just type the food items, or as how you would speak it like ,"I had a burger with fries and a soda."
The user can then log that food, edit that meal, add more items, or find their calorie limit, which is based on their personal details like their weight, height and age.
This makes it extremely easy to log more complicated meals or those with lots of ingredients like customized salads since the user just types exactly what they had as if they were telling it someone.
Besides being able to understand natural language, Forksy also allows users to track food by using emojis or uploading a photo of the meal—although this is more of an experimental feature right now. The chatbot will get smarter over time, meaning sometimes it needs a little help figuring out what an item is if a picture is uploaded.
Forksy provides the user with a food diary that features how many calories they consumed, along with their daily limit, and other details like how much fat, carbs and protein they had. It then gives the complete list of everything the user tracked for that day.
The chatbot comments on the food the user ate, revealing that she is upset when the user eats something unhealthy after telling her they want to lose weight. Forksy will also provide the user with nutritional tips to help them reach their goals.
Overall, this chatbot is a much faster way to count calories, and much for fun to keep the user engaged on their nutrition plans.
"While many food-logging tools are already on the market, most are either too complicated or boring for the average individual (not an athlete, not a quantified-self geek)," Mike Ushakov, the founder of ForksyBot writes on Product Hunt. "That's why we created Forksy....We wanted to make the food logging process simpler, more engaging, and more informative for ordinary users, like us."
Users should keep in mind that this food bot is only in its early stages, so its precision, accuracy and other interface features may not be up to par with other more established apps or bots that do similar things.
However, it's worthy checking out if you want to be able to log meals as if you were texting your own nutritionist.
