If you’re a tech enthusiast, there’s no way you’re not watching HBO’s Silicon Valley. So you surely know the Pied Piper crew’s latest shenanigans involve an app that uses a phone’s camera to find facts about food items — a sort of Shazaam for food, if you may.
What originally started out as Jian Yang’s eight favorite recipes for octopus has now become a meme, to the point where HBO even decided to release the app in the real world. But even though the characters are clearly testing the app using a Google Pixel in the show, HBO has only made the app available for iPhone users.
Since we all know the tech geeks of Silicon Valley would be using Android if they were real people, developer Aniruddh Chandratre stepped in to make things right. His new app is unofficial, but it captures the actual spirit of Jian Yang’s app by using your phone’s camera to determine what category a food item falls into.
Try ‘SeeFood’ on Android
Chandratre’s app is called SeeFood just like the one in the show. The name kind of makes you worry about lawsuits from HBO considering it’s unofficial, but the dev is just a college student, so we certainly hope HBO’s not feeling litigious. At any rate, you can try it out by downloading SeeFood straight from the Play Store.
After that, just open the app and grant the permissions it asks for (they’re all reasonable things like “Camera” and “Storage”), then you’ll be ready to try it out. It’s really simple, too — just tap the blue floating action button in the bottom of your screen to open the camera, then snap a quick pic of some food and press “Use Stillshot.”
The app will process your image, though it might be a little slow at times since Chandratre is running the food-identifying algorithm on his personal server for now. Once it’s done, though, the app will identify your food as being from one of 11 categories while providing information about what the algorithm found.
If the app identified your food correctly, make sure to tap the blue check mark near the top of the screen, because Chandratre certainly doesn’t have a classroom full of Stanford students helping him identify foods. In the future, the developer hopes to offer more analysis about the food items his app sees, but for now, at least we’ve finally got a solid SeeFood app for Android!
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