AI Describe is a flexible tool that can help make food logging easier in several situations. It allows you to speak or type out the contents of a meal, and quickly log it without needing to individually search for each food item. It’s especially useful when trying to log food in situations where nutrition information isn’t available (restaurants, home-cooked meals, etc.).
To use AI Describe, pull up the food logging interface using any standard food logging workflow, and tap on “AI Describe,” which is located at the far right of the food logging menu. If you think you’ll use AI Describe frequently, you can even add it to your Shortcuts & Toolbar menu for one-tap access.
From there, just type out the contents of the meal you’d like to log. Alternately, you can tap the microphone button on your keyboard to verbally dictate the contents of the meal.
When you’re done describing the meal, tap the “Find Foods” button to add the foods to your plate.
Once the foods are added to your plate, you can review the foods and quantities that the AI selected based on your description. Make any necessary changes (you might want to add or remove foods, or edit the quantities of the foods the AI selected), and then tap “Log Items” to add them to your food log.
A few suggestions to help you get the most out of AI Describe:
1) Search for common, generic foods rather than branded foods
AI Describe is querying a database of common foods, not the full database of branded foods. So, for instance, “cheeseburger” will return a generic cheeseburger (roughly the average cheeseburger), and “Applebee’s cheeseburger” will return the same generic cheeseburger. For best results, just understand that AI Describe isn’t intended to search for branded food items – if you want to log a specific branded item, using the standard search interface or barcode scanner is still your best bet.
2) Be descriptive, but not too descriptive
It may take a bit of practice and experience to get a feel for the types of queries AI Describe is well-equipped to handle. For instance, it does really well with quantity descriptors (you can say “one cup of tomato sauce” or “100g of tomato sauce,” and it will return those items with the appropriate quantities), but it can struggle with compound descriptors of food items.
As an example, if you want to log a slice of multigrain bread with oats, spelt, pumpkin seeds, and sunflower seeds, you should probably just say (or type) “one slice of multigrain bread.” If you say (or type) “one slice of multigrain bread with oats, spelt, pumpkin seeds, and sunflower seeds,” it might not understand that “oats, spelt, pumpkin seeds, and sunflower seeds” are all components of the multigrain bread, and will instead pull up each of those ingredients as separate food items with default quantities.
3) Use AI Describe to estimate macro- and micro-nutrient content of foods for which you only have calorie information
There will likely be situations where you know the caloric content of a meal, but not its macro- or micronutrient content. For instance, a restaurant might list the caloric content of each dish on its menu, but not provide additional nutrition information. In this situation, you can use AI Describe to more easily log the meal.
For instance, if you’re eating a 500-calorie bean burrito, you could search for “tortilla shell” and “refried beans,” and edit the quantities of both of those items until the total energy content is approximately 500 calories, but that could be somewhat time-consuming. Alternately, you could quick-add 500 calories, but miss out on micronutrient reporting, and still need to estimate the macronutrient content for yourself. Or, you could just type (or say) “500 calorie bean burrito” into AI Describe. Doing so will return a generic bean burrito of an appropriate size to equal 500 calories, with full macro- and micronutrient reporting.
4) Use AI Describe to help you log meals that would otherwise be difficult to log
If you don’t know any of the nutrition information for a meal, and you don’t want to estimate the energy and macronutrient content yourself, AI Describe can be of assistance. Just describe the meal, let AI Describe find common foods that match your descriptions, edit items or quantities if needed, and log it. Most of the time, this should get you pretty close to the actual energy and nutrient content of the meal – certainly close enough for the purposes of the expenditure and coaching algorithms.
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