With new AI models, health monitoring companies have realized that they can now provide insights using both structured and unstructured data. The new goal is to create interfaces and ways to make it easier for users to get into the habit of logging their meals or workouts, as well as having an ever-present AI assistant that can guide people in areas like diet and exercise.
Health startup backed by Khosla Health on Tuesday released a new version of its health assistant Ria, which you can chat with live, via voice and using the camera to get information about your food.
The startup uses OpenAI’s technology to enable this chat feature. With this release, Ria supports more than 50 languages, including 14 Indian languages. The company said it can also support mixed language input such as Hinglish or Spanglish. While the company is heavily using OpenAI’s models for this release, it said that in the future it could use other models if needed.
Through the new version of Ria, users can request an overview of their health for specified time frames such as day, week or month, or an overall summary. The app can pull data from different sources, such as fitness trackers, sleep trackers or glucose monitors to provide users with information about exercise, sleep, readiness and glucose spikes and make recommendations.
Just like Google Gemini’s Live Chat feature, you can turn the camera to ask about different foods and their nutritional value, and then record them.
Healthify also demonstrated using Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to chat 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. In addition, they can do many things in one session, such as get information, create an exercise plan, or record their goals. If you forget to record your food for the day, you can outline your meals in one go instead of typing them and the assistant will record them for you.
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Additionally, the company is trying to use its updated AI in more places. In the coming months, it plans to make the chat assistant central to user onboarding so it can glean more insights from unstructured conversations. (In particular, new-age dating apps have opted for this kind of interface to create better matches for users.)
The startup is also building a more persistent memory layer on top of OpenAI’s models and its assistant, so the app can remember long-term context around preferences and health changes to provide more personalized recommendations.
Healthify also makes the assistant available in conversations with your coach or nutritionist to help you pull data or answer your questions when they’re not available. Plus, it adds Ria to your calls with coaches and nutritionists so she can transcribe calls for information. Users or coaches can also request data from Ria while on a call.
The company’s CEO, Tushar Vashisht, said the team trained Ria on years of conversational data between coaches and users to give sound and accurate advice.
Besides Healthify, other apps like Alma, Cal AI, MyfitnessPaland Ladder have created ways for users to enter their food intake using voice, text or images. Healthify believes that with its live chat feature, aggregation of data from various platforms, and artificial intelligence trained on years of data, it has an edge over its competitors. Additionally, the company has added a way to access your gallery and automatically detect food photos to give you options to add meals you may have missed when you signed in.
“We’re focused on building a nutrition-based data health ecosystem with other integrations. From an AI perspective, we’re putting levers to solve user accountability for health,” company 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 US with updated assistant Ria and meal planning at $20 a month. Before that, the company had tested various plans with text-based artificial intelligence and certified nutrition coaches.
The company said it hopes to soon announce partnerships around GLP-1-supported weight loss programs. In the coming months, Healthify also plans to work with health-monitoring device companies to bring their data to Ria.
Vashisht said the company may raise another round of funding in the near future given its strong adoption and growth in the US.
