Say it
Say dinner. It’s logged.
“Chicken breast 200g, a cup of rice, tablespoon of olive oil.”
One sentence. Three foods, each with its own portion, matched and counted. No searching, no scrolling through a list of fourteen kinds of rice, no typing with one hand while you hold a fork in the other.
The whole thing is three moves.
Tap
One button on the Add Food sheet. No menu, no mode to pick first.
Talk
Say the whole meal in one go, the way you'd say it to a person. The words appear as you speak them.
Check
The foods arrive on a plate with their calories worked out. Change anything, then add the lot.
It works on a plane. Because your voice never leaves the phone.
Voice normally means sending a recording to a server: your audio goes up, an answer comes back, and with no signal there is no answer. That is how cloud speech recognition works, and it is what Fuel8 opts out of.
Apple’s speech recogniser uploads audio to Apple by default. Fuel8 switches that off and demands the on-device engine instead, and if a phone can’t manage it locally, the feature stops and says so rather than quietly uploading the recording anyway.
Turning your sentence into foods is local too. That’s Apple Intelligence, running on the device, with no API key and no request going anywhere. Which is the whole reason this works in a tunnel, on a plane, or in a supermarket with one bar of signal. The 13,521 foods it matches against are already on the phone as well.
When Apple Intelligence isn’t available, Fuel8’s own word matching reads the sentence instead, and the screen tells you which one did the reading. You can see the label in the recording above.
It understands how people actually say portions.
Nobody says “one hundred and fifty grams of white rice, cooked”. They say “a cup of rice”. The difference matters, because a cup of rice and a cup of spinach are not the same weight, so Fuel8 keeps the two kinds of quantity apart instead of averaging its way through them.
- “Chicken breast 200g”
- A weight. 200 g is 200 g whatever food it lands on.
- “A cup of rice”
- A helping. Measured against rice's own serving size, so it never gets confused with a cup of spinach.
- “Two eggs”
- Two helpings. The database already knows what an egg weighs.
- “Chicken and rice”
- No amount given, so each food's own serving size is used rather than a number you never said.
You get the last word, every time.
Dictation mishears people. Brand names and unusual foods more than chicken and rice, and any app that tells you otherwise is selling something. So nothing Fuel8 hears is ever logged on its own. Every food lands on a plate first, with its portion showing, and anything it estimated rather than heard is labelled as an estimate. Change a row, drop one, add another, then tap Add.
There’s a text field on the same screen, and it isn’t a consolation prize. Dictation doesn’t exist in every language, plenty of people are in a quiet office, and typing “2 eggs and toast” is quicker than saying it.