Google App To Count Calories On Instagram Posts

We all love scientific breakthroughs. A few weeks ago we learned about how 3D printing was helping make luxury leather without killing animals. That’s really cool, isn’t it?

However, Google’s latest innovation has us a bit purse-lipped about this thing called progress. The tech giant is allegedly working on a product that will count calories in photographs of food. Brunch just got sad.

At an industry summit in Boston earlier this week, Google researcher Kevin Power talked about calorie counting via artificial intelligence is becoming a possibility. An app called Im2Calories will be able to, theoretically, analyse photographs of food and look at individual elements and discern an approximate calorie count. Reports say that the app is very advanced already. Im2Calories will be able to tell you exactly how you like your eggs – fried or poached, smugly – through sophisticated pixel technology.

And if the app isn’t too sure what it is looking at you will be able to use a menu to lay the guilt on thick. The app will also amass information as it goes on. Whether this will see the rise of robot army rising bent on the end of humanity whose only weakness is Sarah Connor, remains to be seen. In fact, the app has yet to get its patent approved, and mass market access is still a little bit away.

Google maintains that the purpose of the app is to help people make better decisions for their health and to make calorie counting apps that require a lot of manual input redundant. Either way, all those Instagram posts of cupcakes and French toast just got very grim.

Follow Jeanne Sutton on Twitter @jeannedesutun

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