Thanks to 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 that make it easier for users to get into the habit of logging their meals or workouts, as well as having an always-present AI assistant that can help people in areas such as nutrition and exercise.
Health startup backed by Khosla Health on Tuesday, it launched a new version of its health assistant Ria, with which you can talk live, by voice and via camera, and get information about food.
The startup uses OpenAI technology to support this conversational mode. In this version, Ria supports over 50 languages, including 14 Indian languages. The company stated that it can also support the input of mixed languages ​​such as Hinglish or Spanglish. While the company largely uses OpenAI models in this release, it said it may use other models in the future if needed.
With the new version of Ria, users can request an overview of their health over specific time frames, such as a day, week or month, or for an overall summary. The app can pull data from a variety of sources, such as fitness trackers, sleep monitors, or glucose monitors, to provide users with insight into exercise, sleep, readiness, and glucose spikes, as well as provide suggestions.
Similar to Google Gemini's live chat mode, you can point the camera to ask about different foods and their nutritional value, then save them.
Healthify also showed a demonstration of using Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to talk to Ria in real time and use the device's camera to record food.
The startup believes that its users will feel more comfortable talking to the assistant in real time. Plus, they can do multiple things in one session, such as gaining insights, generating an exercise plan, or recording their goals. If you forget to write down your meals for the day, you can describe them in one go instead of typing them out and the assistant will write them down for you.
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Moreover, the company wants to use its updated AI in more places. In the coming months, it plans to make the conversational assistant a central part of user onboarding so it can glean more insights from unstructured conversations. (New age dating apps in particular have opted for this type of interface to provide users with a better match).
The startup is also creating a more persistent memory layer for OpenAI models and its assistant, so that the app remembers long-term context around preferences and health changes to provide more personalized suggestions.
Healthify also provides an assistant during calls with your trainer or dietitian to help each of you collect data or answer questions when it's not available. Additionally, it adds Ria to conversations with trainers and nutritionists, so she can transcribe conversations for insights. Users or trainers can also ask Ria for data during a call.
The company's CEO Tushar Vashisht said the team trained Ria based on years of data from conversations between trainers and users so that it could provide reasoned and accurate advice.
Apart from Healthify, other apps like Alma, Cal AI, MyfitnessPaland Ladder allowed users to enter food amounts via voice, text or images. Healthify believes it has a competitive advantage thanks to its live conversation mode, aggregation of data from different platforms and artificial intelligence trained on years of data. What's more, the company has added the ability to access your gallery and automatically detect food photos to give you the ability to add meals you may have missed after logging in.
“We are focused on creating a health ecosystem based on nutrition data with other integrations. From an AI perspective, we are introducing levers to address user responsibility for health,” company CPO Paritosh Kumar told TechCrunch.
Healthify, which has more than 45 million registered users and several million monthly active users, is also launching a new AI plan in the US with an updated Ria assistant and meal planning for $20 per month. Previously, the company tested various plans with the help of text-based AI and certified nutrition coaches.
The company said it hopes to announce a partnership soon for GLP-1-assisted weight loss programs. In the coming months, Healthify also plans to partner with health tracker manufacturers to bring their data to Ria.
Vashisht said the company may raise a fresh round of funding in the near future given its strong presence and growth in the US.
