Can you imagine going to a restaurant, bringing your smartphone or tablet to the plate you are going to eat and telling you the calories it contains? Well soon it will be possible. Google and Apple have started working on this project and it may soon become a reality. It will be like always taking the famous calorie counter from the ad with you! But who will win this race?
At the moment Google has already announced and started the process of homologation of the patent of Im2Calories , an App to determine the caloric value of dishes. With no release date yet, this application promises to tell us how many calories a dish has just by analyzing a typical photograph that we have all uploaded to Instagram . For this, it will be based on the development of an Artificial Intelligence project that, with the use of the application itself, will improve its operation.
Some of you may say: that can already be done with the App Meal Snap . And somehow it is. This application is able to tell us approximately the calories that a dish contains, yes, but it does not take into account any other variable. Meal Snap uses a camera and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to count calories.
However, it seems that this option has not been to the liking of any of the great powers of the technological world (no one has bought it to develop and perfect it) but that they have opted to implement their own technologies. Adding to Google’s progress is Apple , who almost a year ago also announced that it was working on its own “calorie counter.” His project has the peculiarity that it is the computers that make the calculations on the caloric content of the meals.
The main technology on which Ceres by SRI is based, which is how the project has been named, is image recognition with the addition of being able to also use contextual information (the place where the user is tasting the dish, for example) to make the calculation of calories present in the food more precise. In this way, they take into account factors such as the approximate amount of oil as well as short-term data such as the type of restaurant.
Dror Oren , CEO of SRI Ventures , has acknowledged that it is difficult to accurately calculate calories in food because there are certain ingredients such as oil and butter that are not visible naked eye. However, having an approximate idea of the calories contained in the dishes they are going to consume is already tremendously useful for many people, explained in statements to Gigaom .
Although many would already like this technology to be operational already, SRI is looking for partners to support it so it hopes that it will be ready and can present it to the general public in about a year.
The battle to get the “ calorie counter ” has begun. One more between Google and Apple.
Meanwhile, we leave you a video with the real one, the pioneer , calorie counter:
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