Asken Diet: nutrition advice app for Ionic and Versa now available

[mtstaffa]

Asken Diet has everything you need to better understand your diet and nutritional intake. Simply log your meals to receive personalized meal advice from our team of dietitians and nutritionists, right on your Fitbit Ionic or Versa. Asken Diet takes your weight goals and health data and creates a plan to help guide you to become a healthier you. The partner iOS/Android mobile app is currently only available in the U.S. and Canada (with more countries coming soon). 

Our digital A.I. dietitian provides real scientific advice curated from our team of hundreds of dietitians and nutritionists. It's more than a simple calorie counter, Asken Diet will monitor your meal record and provide you with actionable advice to hit your target weight loss goals.

Learn more here or visit the Fitbit App Gallery (link).

[mtstaffa]

Hi @ValerieAnne, thanks for checking out Asken Diet and reaching out to me here. Great questions. 

1) Regarding the photo recognition system. This system is still in "beta" which means we are still testing and improving it. We mention it is in beta the first time a user tries to use the photo recognition system. To be honest, the system needs to get more photos from users to improve its accuracy so it can "learn" faster. The system was built by Sony and they control it's AI and our team is regularly meeting with them to tweak how that photo system works. Sorry it isn't better yet. We know and are working on it. Best thing for users to do is try taking photos and if/when it labels it wrong, to adjust the item name/search result to a more correct item. Over time it will get better. Not trying to give excuses or pass on the blame, I just wanted to let you know that the updates/changes are mostly in control of the Sony team and not us.

2) All new members start with a free 7-days of Premium membership. This is our way to give users a chance to try Premium. No strings attached. No hidden renewal. Once those 7 days are over, your account automatically returns to the Free member level. That way the power is in the users hands to decide if/when to return to the Premium member by paying. We wanted to be honest and fair this way. Maybe we can do a better job of showing users they are on a free trial for those 7-days. I'll mention this to the designer. 

As for the payment frequency, I can share this with the team. We've had a few people email us about it. To be honest, we have so many improvements and new functions to add that we are focusing on that first. After that we will think more about the payment structure. But sharing your feedback like this really does help us when it comes to deciding as it is best to have user feedback. So thank you for sharing it. We are listening.

And if you were curious, click on the links to see who writes the diet advice in the app or what Asken means!

Thank you for the positive words too on the app. We are a really small team (less than 10 people). We know the app isn't perfect but we are working hard to get it close! Thanks for using our app. If you have more questions later, check out our Support page or email support@askendiet.com and I'll reply there. 🙂

[ValerieAnne]

@mtstaffa, so sorry, I didn't even notice it said beta  when I clicked on that feature. I will continue to use it/change the items, as it hasn't gotten anything correct yet (for me, personally), but it's come close to a few things (yesterday, I had a brownie, it was a bit thick and it thought it was a chocolate cake). So, I can't wait to see how much better it would do once it gets more and more fine tuned.

When I logged in to log yesterday (day 2) I received a pop up about premium. 🙂 So, I think I'll let my free trial expire and see if the free is enough, if not, I'll probably be back to premium. For being such a small team, I think ya'll are doing great. As far as it linking/connecting to the Fitbit app. Is it supposed to pull over/into Fitbit? I am getting my fitbit information into Asken Diet (exercise/steps/calories) but none of the information from Asken is being sent over to Fitbit (water, food diary). I'm not sure if it's supposed to go both ways or not though. 

It took a bit to link up with the Versa (then again, it took a bit of time for Fitbit to let me link to my Versa to begin with, but that's a different story LOL) but once it did, everything has been working smoothly.  I know you said to e-mail on the support or through the e-mail, but thought this question/the above, may benefit the whole community. 

[mtstaffa]

Hi @ValerieAnne, sorry for my late reply.  

No need to apologize about not seeing the "beta" text when launching the photo analysis system for the first time.  It will/should get better based on two factors.  1) slightly improved from the photos you take and edit/adjust to categorize to a more correct item.  2) much improved by algorithm tweaks the team at Sony does on a quarterly basis (where they look at all kinds of data and fine tune accordingly). A bit of background on the photo system... our app originated in Japan where it is the top diet app here...and the photo system works REALLY well with Japanese food. That is largely because meals here are broken up in to dished.  Think rice bowl, bowl of soup, salad, main dish etc.  So the system can easily identify things separated like that. But in the West, we tend to put a lot of things on one plate (maybe to do less dishes when we are done?!) and all those things on the plate are confusing the system... so we are in the process of re-teaching it for Western foods.  So a tip when taking photos might be to spread things out on your plate (so there is some white space around each food group) and make try different angles of the dish to see what works best. Hope that info helps a little.

As far as linking things with Fitbit, for now we only receive exercise, steps and calories. We have plans (and its already been designed and mocked up) to pull BMR data from Fitbit in to Asken Diet too. But unfortunately we don't have plans to pull food/water data from Fitbit in to Asken Diet. I've had brief discussions with the teams of Fitbit about doing this but our food databases are not identical so if we tried to pull in an item from Fitbit (for example) that didn't have all the nutrient information we needed to provide diet advice, then it would be confusing to the user.  It is a tricky issue that ideally we could solve easily but its a bit harder than we had hoped.

Glad to hear you got things synced up with your Versa too. Versa and Ionic can be tricky at times but they are new devices and I know the developers at Fitbit are working hard to continuously improve them. I love my Ionic.

[conn1e]

same issue--downloaded the app and will not connect to my fitbit.  I logged a few meals yesterday and today--still not connecting correctly

[mtstaffa]

Hi. Sorry to hear about the trouble.

Our Support article should help: https://support.askendiet.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005194853-Sync-with-Fitbit-Versa-Ionic

You need to have an account (which is free) on our iOS/Android Asken Diet account (www.askendiet.com/get) and use that account when logging in to the Fitbit Asken Diet Ionic/Versa app.

From my experience (I have an Ionic) it can be a bit finicky when entering log in details. Maybe try deleting the app, restarting your watch (hold the bottom right button + left button) and then re-download the Asken Diet Fitbit app.

Hope that helps. Email support@askendiet.com and i'll answer there if you are still having troubles.

[MarreFitbit]

Hi my friend @conn1e, it's nice to see a new member around! My friend @mtstaffa is part of the developer team of this great app and he's offered assistance to sort this out, please let him know if the steps work. 

Have a nice day!