With the rise of advanced AI models, health-tracking companies are discovering new ways to combine structured and unstructured data to deliver deeper insights. Their latest mission: build interfaces that make it easier for users to consistently log meals, workouts, and daily habits, supported by an AI assistant that is always present and able to guide users on nutrition, exercise, and overall wellness.
On Tuesday, Khosla-backed health startup Healthify launched a major update to its AI health assistant, Ria. The new version allows users to interact in real time using voice and the device camera, enabling live conversations and instant food recognition.
Powered largely by OpenAI’s technology, the updated Ria supports over 50 languages, including 14 Indian languages, and can intelligently understand mixed-language inputs like Hinglish or Spanglish. While OpenAI models drive this release, the company says it is open to exploring other models in the future.
Through this new conversational interface, users can request health overviews for any period, daily, weekly, monthly, or all-time. Ria can pull data from fitness trackers, sleep monitors, glucose devices, and more to provide insights on activity, sleep quality, readiness, glucose spikes, and actionable suggestions.
Similar to Google Gemini’s live conversation mode, users can now point their camera at any food item to get nutritional details and log it instantly. Healthify also showcased a demo using Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, allowing users to chat with Ria hands-free while the glasses capture food images for logging.
The startup believes people will feel more comfortable having natural, live conversations with an assistant. Within a single interactive session, users can log meals, get health insights, generate workout plans, and set goals. If a user forgets to log meals during the day, they can simply describe everything at once and Ria will take care of the logging.
Looking ahead, Healthify plans to make the conversational assistant central to the onboard experience, allowing the app to collect richer insights from free-form conversations. The company is also building a long-term memory layer on top of Ria, enabling the assistant to remember user preferences and health trends to give more personalized guidance.
Ria will also be available in chats with nutritionists and health coaches, helping both sides pull data or answer questions instantly. During calls, Ria will transcribe conversations and generate insights, while users or coaches can request additional data on the spot.
According to CEO Tushar Vashisht, the company trained Ria using years of conversational data between coaches and users, resulting in advice that is more grounded and accurate.
Healthify joins other apps such as Alma, Cal AI, MyFitnessPal, and Ladder in enabling food logging via voice, text, or images. However, the company believes its real-time conversation mode, broad data aggregation, and rich training data give it a competitive edge. A new feature also lets the app scan your gallery to detect food photos and suggest missed logs.
“We are focused on building a nutrition-driven health ecosystem with integrations that support accountability,” CPO Paritosh Kumar told TechCrunch.
With more than 45 million registered users and millions of monthly active users, Healthify is now launching a new U.S. AI plan featuring the updated Ria and personalized meal planning for $20 per month. This follows earlier tests that combined text-based AI with certified nutrition coaching.
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The company is preparing to announce partnerships related to its GLP-1-supported weight-loss programs and plans to integrate more health-tracking devices into Ria soon. Following strong adoption in the U.S., Healthify is also considering raising a new funding round in the near future.
