Calorie tracking is a proven way to lose weight, but all the tracking apps that I tried feel like they take too much effort. So I came up with an idea a few years ago: you should be able to just say what you had eaten out loud, and then use speech-to-text and NLP to search for each item and count up the calories.
I never got around to building that, but these guys did: https://www.nutritionix.com/app
It works amazingly well. Not only is speech 3x faster than typing, it's also much faster to have a free-form text field that is automatically parsed. And they integrate with Amazon Echo, which I look forward to trying out.
I've been thinking about many other ways to automate calorie tracking. For a while I thought the answer would be an AI that recognizes photos of food, but that doesn't feel important any more. I think speech-to-text takes approximately the same amount of time as opening the camera and snapping a photo. There have a been a few minor errors with Apple's voice dictation, but so far I've seen 100% accuracy from the actual text searches.
So anyway, speech-to-text research. It's all important.