For people struggling with obesity¹, logging calorie counts and other nutritional² information at every meal is a proven way to lose weight. The technique does require consistency³ and accuracy, however, and when it fails, it's usually because people don't have the time to find and record all the information they need. A few years ago, a team of nutritionists from Tufts University who had been experimenting with mobile-phone apps for recording⁴ caloric intake⁵ approached members of the Spoken Language Systems Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), with the idea of a spoken-language application that would make meal logging even easier.

 

This week, at the International Conference on Acoustics⁶, Speech, and Signal Processing in Shanghai, the MIT researchers are presenting a Web-based prototype of their speech-controlled nutrition-logging system.

 

With it, the user verbally describes the contents of a meal, and the system parses⁷ the description and automatically retrieves⁸ the pertinent⁹ nutritional data from an online database maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

 

The data is displayed together with images of the corresponding foods and pull-down menus that allow the user to refine their descriptions -- selecting, for instance, precise quantities of food. But those refinements¹⁰ can also be made verbally. A user who begins by saying, "For breakfast, I had a bowl of oatmeal, bananas, and a glass of orange juice" can then make the amendment¹¹, "I had half a banana," and the system will update the data it displays about bananas while leaving the rest unchanged.

 

"What [the Tufts nutritionists] have experienced is that the apps that were out there to help people try to log meals tended to be a little tedious, and therefore people didn't keep up with them," says James Glass, a senior research scientist at CSAIL, who leads the Spoken Language Systems Group. "So they were looking for ways that were accurate and easy to input¹² information."

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