Bixby Calorie Counting Feature Could Make The AI Worth Using
It's no secret that many Galaxy owners are less than fond of Samsung's personal assistant, Bixby. The company included a physical button on its most recent flagship phones for summoning Bixby, but that backfired. Complaints prompted the company to finally add a way to fully disable the service, but users may find a use for it after all: the company is teaching its AI to count the calories in food.
Image-based calorie counting isn't a new idea, but Samsung may be the first to bring the technology to consumers. The way it works, generally speaking, involves the user taking a photo of their food, after which point the system analyses the contents and estimates the number of calories. This would be an excellent alternative to food diaries for casual dieters who want a general idea of their intake without needing precision.
Samsung revealed the Bixby project at CES 2018, though it's not available to the general public at this time. There's no indication of when Samsung may introduce the feature on its phones. Assuming it was deployed in its current form, users would need to disassemble their food to snap a shot of each ingredient, which is impractical.
In the future, though, Bixby may be able to make a general estimate of ingredients and calories based on one image. Whatever the results are, they'll be — at least in the future implementation, should it all proceed according to plan — added to the user's overall information in the Samsung Health app. The feature isn't a definite thing, though — there's no promise that Samsung will definitely roll out this ability to Galaxy phones.
If it does arrive, though, it'll have the same limitations facing other image-based calorie counters: it will only be able to make general estimates based on generic data, and that may not always be accurate. For example, a system that identifies the type of meal and estimates its quantity may then present calorie information based on a generic recipe for that dish. If the dish was made with something atypical, or with an excessive quantity of something, the estimates could by far off.
SOURCE: Engadget