[Review] Cooking Recipes Made Easy for Diet Management... Asukup's 'FoodLens'

"Curry pairs well with spicy foods, refreshing salads, and beer. How does that sound?"

AI specialist company Upstage has introduced a food analysis feature by applying FoodLens to its chatbot ‘AskUp’. This function recognizes ingredients and predicts recipes to identify all kinds of food, even recognizing the size of the food from 2D images. The AI healthcare startup DoingLab developed it for overseas expansion.

How advanced is the food photo recognition? On the 1st, I sent photos of Thai dishes, Phu Phat Phong Curry and stir-fried noodles, to AskUp. "Food information recognized: Stir-fried noodles (noodles, shrimp, sesame, etc.) 561 kcal, carbohydrates 80g, protein 19g, fat 15g."

Within less than 3 seconds of sending, it provided the ingredients and calories, as well as the nutrients contained in the food such as carbohydrates, protein, and fat. When I asked for foods that go well with stir-fried noodles, it recommended dumplings, gimbap, and cola.

The diet management feature was also excellent. When I touched the ‘Record’ button among the buttons appearing below the food information, it analyzed the nutrients of the last five foods whose photos I sent and advised, "The carbohydrate and protein content is well balanced, making it a good choice nutritionally. We recommend adding more vegetables, eggs, meat, and other diverse ingredients to your intake."

Through the ‘Story’ button that tells stories related to food and the ‘Recipe’ button that explains how to make the food, I was able to have various conversations. When I sent a photo of pizza saved in my personal photo album and pressed the ‘Story’ button, it told me about the origin, types of pizza, and the most expensive pizza in the world. Also, when I sent a photo of a steak and pressed the ‘Recipe’ button, it informed me about the grades and types of steak, as well as the time and temperature for cooking. The quick interaction made it feel like talking to a personal nutritionist or chef.

The biggest advantage of AskUp FoodLens is its excellent accessibility through integration with KakaoTalk. You can start using it immediately by searching for ‘AskUp’ in the KakaoTalk top search bar and pressing the ‘Add Channel’ button.

Another advantage is that you can use AskUp’s original chatbot service without switching chat windows besides food analysis. AskUp is a chatbot developed by Upstage based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, combined with its own OCR technology, question mark (?) search, and image generation model UpSketch. When users take pictures of books or documents and upload them to KakaoTalk chat rooms, AskUp reads and understands the text within the images and answers questions. With these features, it earned the nickname ‘ChatGPT with eyes’ and secured 1 million users.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.