There's an endless number of apps that claim to help with weight loss. But one now claims to be able to tell you exactly how many calories are in your food -- just by taking a picture of what you're eating. Healthify prompts you to take a picture of your meals. Using artificial intelligence (AI), it can recognise food on your plate, as well as how much you have, to generate a nutritional breakdown. A new version of the app, which will be rolled out in the UK in the coming days, includes the feature called Snap 2.0.

In 2016, after four years of running a health and fitness app that lets customers track their daily food and workout routines, health-tech startup HealthifyMe found that it was sitting on millions of data points about its users' lifestyle habits. The Bengaluru-based company's customers were using the app to not only log and track their health regimes, but also talk to nutritionists or fitness coaches. This meant that HealthifyMe had data on everything from users' food and workout logs to the questions they asked the nutritionists and the responses they received. So the company, which is backed by IDG Ventures India, Inventus Capital, and Blume Ventures, among others, decided to feed all this information to a machine-learning algorithm and help fitness coaches respond better to app users. That project has now developed into a customer-facing programme where an AI-driven bot talks to over 25,000 of HealthifyMe's paid subscribers, similar to how Google Assistant or Amazon's Alexa operate.

HealthifyMe, a five-year-old start-up backed by Dubai-based NB Ventures, has unveiled a new health and fitness app, by which a user can talk to a nutritionist created by artificial intelligence. The Bengaluru-based firm, which developed the eponymous app, will make the new AI-powered app available to select consumers initially and roll-out the full feature version by January, Tushar Vashisht, co-founder and CEO said in an interview. "There are three million users and 100 million exercises on the app," Mr. Vashisht said. "Millions of exchanges between nutritionists and consumers led us to create a knowledge graph. The graph consisted of both structured and unstructured data. It is probably the world's first completely artificial intelligent nutritionist."