Healthify is upgrading its AI assistant Ria with real-time conversational capabilities

With new AI models, health tracking companies have realized that they can now provide insights using structured and unstructured data. The new goal is to create interfaces and ways that make it easier for users to create the habit of logging their meals or workouts, along with having an ever-present AI assistant that can guide people in areas like nutrition and exercise.

Khusla-backed health startup Healthify on Tuesday launched a new version of its health assistant Ria, which you can talk to directly via voice and using a camera to get inputs about your food.

The startup uses OpenAI technology to power this conversation mode. With this release, Ria supports more than 50 languages, including 14 Indian languages. The company said it can also support mixed language input such as Hinglish or Spanglish. While the company is largely using OpenAI models for this release, it said it could use other models in the future if necessary.

With the new version of Ria, users can request an overview of their health for specific time frames such as a day, week or month, or a comprehensive summary. The app can pull data from various sources such as fitness trackers, sleep trackers, or glucose monitors to give users insights into exercise, sleep, readiness, and glucose spikes and make suggestions.

Just like Google Gemini’s live chat mode, you can point the camera to ask about different food items and their nutritional value, and then record them.

Healthify also showed off a demo of using Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to talk to Ria in real time and use the device’s camera to record food.

The startup believes that its users will feel more comfortable chatting in real-time with an assistant. Additionally, they can do multiple things in one session, such as get insights, create a workout plan, or record their goals. If you forget to log your food for the day, you can describe your meals all at once instead of writing them down, and Assistant will log them for you.

Furthermore, the company is looking to leverage the updated AI in more places. In the coming months, it plans to make Conversation Assistant a key part of the user onboarding process so it can gather more insights from unstructured conversations. (It’s worth noting that new-age dating apps have co-opted this type of interface to create better matches for users.)

The startup is also creating a more persistent memory layer on its OpenAI and Assistant models to make the app remember long-term context around health preferences and changes to provide more personalized suggestions.

Healthify also makes Assistant available in conversations with your coach or nutritionist to help either of you pull data or answer your questions when she’s not available. Plus, it adds Ria to your calls with trainers and nutritionists so you can transfer calls for insights. Users or coaches can also ask Ria for data while on a call.

The company’s CEO, Tushar Vashisht, said the team trained Rhea on years of conversation data between coaches and users to provide precise and accurate advice.

Aside from Healthify, other apps like Alma, Cal AI, MyfitnessPal and Ladder have created ways for users to enter food intakes using voice, text or images. Healthify believes that thanks to its live chat mode, aggregation of data from different platforms, and AI trained on years of data, it has an advantage over its competitors. What’s more, the company has added a way to access your photo gallery and automatically detect food photos to give you options to add meals you may have missed logging in.

“We are focused on creating a healthy ecosystem of nutrition-based data with other integrations. From an AI perspective, we are creating tools to solve accountability for users when it comes to health,” Paritosh Kumar, chief corporate officer at the company, told TechCrunch.

Healthify, which has more than 45 million registered users and a few million monthly active users, is launching a new AI plan in the US with an updated Ria assistant and meal planning at $20 per month. Before that, the company was testing different plans using text-based AI and certified nutrition coaches.

The company said it hopes to soon announce partnerships around GLP-1-assisted weight loss programs. In the coming months, Healthify also 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 adoption and growth in the US.