Healthify RIA: AI Assistant Now with Real-Time Conversation

AI-Powered Health Insights: Healthify's New Ria Assistant

Recent advancements in AI modeling have enabled health-tracking companies to leverage both structured and unstructured data for enhanced user insights. The current focus is on developing user interfaces and interaction methods that encourage consistent logging of meals and workouts. This includes providing an intelligent AI assistant capable of offering guidance on nutrition and exercise.

Healthify Launches Enhanced Ria with Real-Time Conversation

Healthify, a health startup supported by Khosla, has unveiled a new iteration of its health assistant, Ria. This updated version allows for live interaction through voice commands and utilizes the device’s camera to gather information about food intake.

The conversational functionality is powered by technology from OpenAI. Ria now supports over 50 languages, encompassing 14 Indian languages, and can even process mixed-language inputs like Hinglish or Spanglish. While currently relying on OpenAI’s models, the company retains the flexibility to integrate alternative models as needed.

Data Integration and Personalized Insights

Users can now request health overviews for specific periods – daily, weekly, or monthly – or receive a comprehensive summary. The application aggregates data from various sources, including fitness trackers, sleep monitors, and glucose monitors, to provide insights into exercise patterns, sleep quality, readiness levels, and glucose fluctuations. Personalized suggestions are then offered based on this integrated data.

Similar to Google Gemini’s Live Conversation feature, users can utilize the camera to identify food items and obtain nutritional information, simplifying the logging process.

A demonstration showcased Ria’s compatibility with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, enabling real-time voice interaction and food logging via the device’s camera.

Enhanced User Experience and Functionality

The startup anticipates that real-time conversational interaction will foster greater user engagement. This approach allows for multiple tasks to be completed within a single session, such as obtaining insights, generating exercise plans, or recording dietary information. If meal logging is delayed, users can simply describe their meals, and the assistant will record them accordingly.

Furthermore, the company intends to integrate the updated AI into the user onboarding process to gather more comprehensive insights from unstructured conversations. This mirrors strategies employed by modern dating applications to improve user matching.

Long-Term Memory and Personalized Recommendations

Healthify is developing a persistent memory layer to enhance OpenAI’s models and the assistant’s ability to retain long-term context regarding user preferences and health changes. This will facilitate the delivery of more tailored recommendations.

Integration with Healthcare Professionals

The assistant is also being made available during conversations with health coaches or nutritionists, enabling both parties to access data and address questions even when the professional is unavailable. Ria will also transcribe calls with coaches and nutritionists, providing valuable insights. Data can be requested by users or coaches during these calls.

According to Healthify’s CEO, Tushar Vashisht, Ria has been trained on extensive conversational data from coach-user interactions to ensure accurate and well-founded advice.

Competitive Advantage and Future Plans

Apps like Alma, Cal AI, MyFitnessPal, and Ladder also offer voice, text, or image-based food intake logging. However, Healthify believes its live conversation mode, combined with data aggregation and AI trained on years of data, provides a distinct competitive advantage. The company has also implemented a feature to automatically detect food photos from the user’s gallery, simplifying the logging of potentially missed meals.

“Our focus is on building a health ecosystem centered around nutrition-driven data and integrations,” stated Paritosh Kumar, the company’s CPO, to TechCrunch. “From an AI perspective, we are implementing mechanisms to promote accountability in users’ health journeys.”

New AI Plan and Partnerships

Healthify, with over 45 million registered users and several million active monthly users, is launching a new AI-powered plan in the U.S. This plan, priced at $20 per month, includes the updated Ria assistant and personalized meal planning. Previously, the company tested various plans featuring text-based AI and certified nutrition coaches.

The company anticipates announcing partnerships related to its GLP-1-aided weight-loss programs soon. Additionally, Healthify plans to collaborate with health tracking-device companies to integrate their data into Ria.

Vashisht indicated that the company may seek a new funding round in the near future, given its strong adoption and growth in the U.S. market.