CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise.
The Zoe Health: AI Meal Tracker has multiple features, and I tested them all. Getty Image/Zooey Liao/CNET
It can be difficult to determine the healthiness of a certain food just by looking at it or taking a glance at its packaging. That's why barcode scanning and AI meal tracking apps now exist. For six weeks, I tested one of these apps, Zoe Health: AI Meal Tracker, to take a closer look at my diet and see if the app delivers on its promises.
"The inspiration was to make something that was super easy to use, really fun, positive in its messaging and to turn the typical nutrition tracker on its head, so to create something that doesn't feel like you're trying to not eat anything," says Dr. Federica Amati, head nutritionist at Zoe, on what inspired the app's creation.
How the Zoe Health app works
The Zoe app was designed by the creators of the world's largest nutrition study and combines several features that could be beneficial for learning more about your nutrition -- that is, if they work correctly. Here was my experience.
AI photo logging: It's fast and weirdly accurate
The AI photo-logging feature allows you to take a photo of your meal to see a breakdown of the ingredients (which you can edit) and the nutrition facts, along with a food score and an overview of the food and why it received the score it did from Ziggie, the app's AI nutrition coach. The food score ranges from 0 to 100 and indicates how certain foods may impact your health.
During clinical trials, Amati says the company tested manually logging meal photos and weighing all the included ingredients versus using AI for photo logging. "We compared [AI photo logging] to manual logging, and it is above 95% in terms of accuracy match, so we're the first validated photo-logging tool on the market," she says.
Along with the clinical trial data, the photo-logging AI analyzes millions of food photos on the internet to pinpoint exactly what your dish is, whether you're at home or in a restaurant.
... continue reading