Samsung’s Bixby Assistant Can Count Food Calories

Samsung wants Bixby to play a greater role in its ecosystem and it’s gradually expanding the assistant to more devices. The company has already confirmed at CES 2018 that all of its 2018 Smart TVs will be shipped with Bixby onboard in the United States. That being said, Samsung continues to work on new features for Bixby on smartphones. One such feature is the ability to count calories in food.

Samsung demonstrated this experimental feature at its CES 2018 booth in Las Vegas. The feature isn’t ready to be released to the public just yet but it highlights what Bixby might be capable of in the future.

The feature was able to tell a margherita pizza apart from a plate of salmon sushi. However, it’s not yet capable of correctly identifying everything on a plate just yet. Moreover, the handset’s camera has to be pointed at each individual food item for Bixby to provide the calorie count. It can’t lump all of them together and provide a complete calorie count at this stage.

Samsung says that Bixby is going to use generic data for food items which means that the calorie counts won’t be absolutely precise. However, it will be significantly faster to discover the calorie count with this feature compared to launching an app like MyFitnessPal and adding each item separately.

The company also said that the data will then be synced to a profile in the Samsung Health app to let users better understand their calorie intake compared to their burn rate. What it didn’t reveal is that if and when this feature is going to be released for everyone.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: bixby, CES, CES 2018, Samsung