With new AI models, health tracking companies realize they can now provide insights using both structured and unstructured data. The new goal is to create interfaces and methods that make it easier for users to build a habit of logging their meals or workouts, while also having an ever-present AI assistant that can guide people in areas like nutrition and exercise.
Khosla-backed health startup healthy On Tuesday, it launched a new version of its health assistant Rhea, which you can talk to live, via voice, and use the camera to get input about your food.
The startup is using OpenAI’s technology to power this conversational mode. With this release, Rhea supports more than 50 languages, including 14 Indian languages. The company says it can also support mixed language input like Hinglish or Spanglish. While the company is heavily using OpenAI’s models for this release, it says it may use other models in the future if needed.
With the new version of Ria, users can ask for their health overview for specific time periods such as days, weeks or months, or overall summaries. The app can pull data from a variety of sources such as fitness trackers, sleep trackers or glucose monitors to give users insights and advice on exercise, sleep, preparation and glucose spikes.
Just like Google Gemini’s live conversation mode, you can point the camera to ask about different food items and their nutritional values, then log them.
HealthFi also showed a demo of using the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to talk to Rhea in real time and use the device’s camera to log meals.
The startup believes its users will feel more comfortable chatting with an assistant in real time. Plus, they can do multiple things in one session, like get insights, create an exercise plan or log their goals. If you forget to log your meals for the day, you can describe your meals at once instead of typing them in and Assistant will log them for you.
Healthify upgrades its AI assistant
What’s more, the company is looking 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. (Notably, new-age dating apps have opted for this type of interface to create better matches for users.)
The startup is building a more permanent memory layer on top of OpenAI’s model and its assistant so that the app can remember long-term context to make more personalized suggestions about preferences and health changes.
Healthify makes conversational assistants available with your trainer or nutritionist so you can help anyone pull data or find answers to your questions. Plus, it’s adding Rhea to your calls with coaches and nutritionists so it can transcribe calls for insight. Users or instructors can ask Rhea for data during a call.
The company’s CEO, Tushar Vashishta, said the team trained Rhea on data from conversations between coaches and users to give grounded and accurate advice.
Apart from Healthify, other apps like Alma, Cal AI, MyFitnessPalAnd Ladder has created a way for users to input food intake using voice, text or images. Healthify believes it is ahead of its competitors with its live conversation mode, data aggregation from various platforms and AI trained on years of data. What’s more, the company added a way to access your gallery and automatically detect food photos to give you options to add food you might have missed logging in.
Paritosh Kumar, the company’s CPO, told TechCrunch, “We are focused on building a health ecosystem of nutrition-driven data with other integrations. From an AI perspective, we are putting levers in place to provide solutions for user accountability in health.”
Healthify, which has more than 45 million registered users and several million active monthly users, is also launching a new AI plan in the US with an updated Rhea assistant and a meal plan for $20 per month. Earlier, the company had been testing different plans with text-based AI and certified nutrition coaches.
The company said it expects to soon announce partnerships around its GLP-1-assisted weight loss programs. In the coming months, Healthify plans to partner with health tracking device companies to bring their data to Ria.
Vashisht said the company may raise a new funding round in the near future, given its strong US adoption and growth.