Hi, HN.

Long time reader, first time writer here.

This product has been a dream of mine for many years.

Someone wise once said, “We are what we eat,” and although it’s a bit of a stretch, I always wondered who we are considering the food environment today.

Food is everywhere, and living a casual city life, it’s hard to find yourself more than a hundred steps from a food source. The last time, I was surprised to find a food shelf in a bookstore. (I thought it was about “food for the soul”)

An even bigger problem is the contents of that food. It raises a lot of questions about the worst traits of capitalism and human exploitation.

So, I believe it’s always good to push back on this and make tools that facilitate mindful eating.

I tried many food trackers over the years, but was never satisfied - it’s just too much hassle. All these interfaces, lists, lists, lists. It takes hours to keep your food diary.

I imagined a good one, where you can just type what you eat, without any effort, but it just wasn’t possible. There was no such tech to make it. Until GPT-4 came on stage.

When I tested it, I was like, “We can really do it now!”

So, first, we bootstrapped a simple telegram bot and gave it to ten friends.

Many seemed to like it, so we invested in developing it further and finally released it as an iOS app.

So, this is the story of Lolo - a food tracking chat bot.

We would be happy to hear what you think and gather any feedback.

You can try it out with a free trial (ATTENTION: make sure to cancel the trial right away to avoid unintentional charging).

Most painful limitations

= It’s only relying on GPT-4 knowledge currently, no external database connected

= No barcode scanner (and it’s not that good with branded items, especially rare ones)

= No long-term memory about food, it only remembers the current day.

= As a consequence, there are discrepancies in nutrition values. We found that usually its errors kind of balance each other on the scale of days, but if you need pro-level accuracy this is definitely not for you. Also, the stricter the inputs the better the outputs. So if you write “I had some meat” it will log something, but “200g roasted chicken breast” will get your closer to the truth.

Of course, many of those are fixable and in the roadmap. Nonetheless, I find it quite usable for my everyday casual food tracking.

Also, for those wondering what’s under the hood I posted a separate article here https://medium.com/@mkuliasov/building-ai-assistants-on-the-...

If you have any questions or ideas feel free to get in touch on Twitter. https://twitter.com/@mkuliasov or https://t.me/mikky_a

Thank you!