Introducing Recipe Import and Meal Scanning with Foodnoms AI
Foodnoms has always been about delivering a simple, delightful experience for food tracking. Today, I am proud to announce a suite of exciting features that further reduce friction by automating the most tedious workflows, making Foodnoms even easier to use.
These new features are powered by Foodnoms AI (previously Ask AI). Foodnoms AI works differently from previous versions of Ask AI and similar features you may find in other apps.
Foodnoms AI leverages real data from the Foodnoms database and is designed to work just like an experienced Foodnoms user, automating the process of searching and logging what you eat.
- Figuring out which search terms to use.
- Searching the Foodnoms database.
- Trying other search keywords if the search yields no relevant results.
- Picking the most relevant result.
- Determining the most appropriate portion size. This is easy when the portion size is supplied, and there is a direct match, but more difficult when you must approximate or handle ambiguity.
- Finally, falling back to an AI estimate if no relevant result is found, even after trying different strategies.
This process is a great fit for automation because it is tedious and repetitive, especially when logging multiple items.
For new users, effectively searching for and logging food can be daunting and confusing. Foodnoms AI helps both experienced and new users more confidently and effectively track what they eat, with less hassle.
Foodnoms AI builds on top of the latest models by OpenAI and the Foodnoms database to deliver high-quality results.
Import Recipes from Websites
You can now import recipes from websites into Foodnoms. The easiest way to import a recipe is via the "Open in Foodnoms" Safari share action:
You can also import by copying the website to your clipboard. You'll be prompted to paste the URL when selecting "Import from Recipe" on the New Recipe screen. Alternatively, you can copy and paste a list of ingredients instead.
I'm glad to finally deliver a high-quality solution that solves an obvious pain point. Recipe import has been a top-requested feature for many years.
The tricky part of recipe import has always been figuring out how to parse the recipe and choose the most appropriate food item and portion size. A lot of work has gone into tuning Foodnoms AI to do an excellent job here.
Speaking of recipes, there are two new fields available for any recipe, regardless of how it's made: URL and notes. These fields are available when logging the recipe.
AI Meal Scanner
You can now easily track your meals using AI right from the main scanner UI. This builds upon the AI image analysis capabilities announced earlier this year.
You'll find on the scanner screen a new toggle at the bottom which lets you switch between "Barcode" and "Foodnoms AI" mode.
Snapping a picture from this UI takes you directly to the redesigned Foodnoms AI loading screen.
Redesigned Foodnoms AI User Interface
A lot of effort has gone into the new Foodnoms AI user interface. It improves upon the previous "Ask AI" design in several ways. Here's a full video demonstration of what it looks like:
You'll first notice that the loading state has been upgraded from a plain spinner loading indicator to a rich, dynamic loading screen that shows step-by-step what the AI is doing. This greatly improves transparency regarding how the AI is working.
One other key improvement is that items in your query are intuitively grouped together. This is used for recipes, but it's also beneficial for other queries that return multiple ingredients, but where it'd be preferable to just wrap it up into a single item to log.
Control Center Widgets
Foodnoms users are always looking for fewer taps and shortcuts to accomplish the same task. These Control Center widgets now offer direct launching points into key workflows of the app: the scanner UI, Foodnoms AI, and the main log screen.
Refreshed App Icons
The main Foodnoms app icon, designed by Matthew Skiles, has been further refined. Matthew also did great work to create the icons for the Control Center widgets. In addition, he created new dark and tinted variants for all of the app icons that he originally created.
With this update, all of the app icons offer dark and tinted variants. The "3D Spork" icon by Gavin Nelson looks particularly handsome in dark mode. And the "3D Chart" icons by Yannick Lung look gorgeous in both dark and tinted modes.
Free AI Usage Credits
As part of this update, free users can now try Foodnoms AI for free without starting a trial. Each user is granted 10 free usages before being asked to start a Foodnoms+ subscription. Eligible users can further evaluate Foodnoms AI in a free 7-day trial with the annual plan.
I hope these new features bring you delight and improve your experience using the app!
As for what's next, there's several large projects in the works, and many other things planned. As always, please stay tuned by subscribing to the Foodnoms Insiders newsletter or following Foodnoms on Mastodon and Threads.
In the meantime, take care!
ā Ryan