AI features

Steady uses Google Gemini for the parts of tracking that are genuinely tedious — turning a sentence, a photo, or a recipe link into real numbers. Here's what it powers, and exactly what leaves your phone.

What the AI does

Feature	What you give it	What you get back
Describe Your Meal	A typed or spoken sentence	Every component as its own item, with nutrition and portion assumptions
Photo of Food	A photo of the plate	The same, read from the image
Recipe from a Link	A recipe URL or YouTube link	The whole recipe broken into ingredients, plus a servings count
Estimate Nutrition	A food name with no database match	A full nutrition panel
Missing protein fill-in	A food logged without protein data	A protein estimate for that item
What Should I Eat?	Nothing — it reads your day	Three realistic options that fit your remaining calories and protein gap
Summarize My Day / Week in Review	Nothing — it reads your log	A review with concrete substitutions

Everything else in Steady — the calorie budget, weight trends, streaks, fueling math, patterns, stats — is plain arithmetic running on your phone. No AI involved, no network needed.

Using your own key

Steady’s AI works as soon as you install it, with no setup. But adding your own free Gemini key is recommended, and takes about a minute:

Go to aistudio.google.com/apikey and sign in with a Google account.
Tap Create API key.
Copy it.
In Steady: Settings → AI & Estimates, paste it into the key field.

The app has this guide built in, with a button that opens the right page directly — Settings → AI & Estimates → How to get a free key.

Why bother? Two reasons. You get your own rate limits rather than sharing a pool, so estimates stay fast when lots of people are using the app at once. And your food descriptions go to Google under your account rather than someone else’s.

Google’s free tier is generous — normal food logging won’t come close to the limits. A key you enter always overrides the built-in one, and you can clear it any time to go back.

Fast vs. accurate

Settings → AI & Estimates has a Higher accuracy toggle:

Off (default) — a lighter model that answers in about a second, with a higher free-tier rate limit. Fine for the vast majority of meals.
On — the fuller model. Slower and more rate-limited, but noticeably better on complicated plates with a lot of components.

Recipe imports always use the fuller model regardless of the toggle, since reading a recipe is an occasional get-it-right action rather than something you do ten times a day.

What actually leaves your phone

Only what a specific AI feature needs, only when you tap the button that uses it:

Sent to Google:

The meal text you typed or dictated
The food photo you took, when you use Photo of Food
The URL you pasted, when you import a recipe
For coaching features, the day’s food names and totals
If blood work is enabled, the bare marker numbers — nothing identifying

Never sent anywhere:

Your weight, weight history, or goals
Progress photos
Your name, email, or any identifier — there isn’t an account to identify you with
Steps, sleep, or anything else from Apple Health
Your location
Anything at all, if you never use an AI feature

Requests go directly from your phone to Google’s API. They don’t pass through any server belonging to Steady, because there isn’t one. Nobody but you and Google sees them, and Google’s handling is governed by the Google APIs Terms and Privacy Policy.

Seeing the prompts yourself

Settings → AI & Estimates lists every AI feature and shows you the verbatim prompt it sends, with your input rendered as ‹placeholders›. Nothing is paraphrased for the settings screen — it’s the actual text.

If you want to know what the app says about you before it says it, that screen is the answer, and it’s worth two minutes of reading.

When the AI is wrong

It sometimes will be. Portion size is the usual culprit — “a bowl of pasta” spans a 400-calorie range, and the model has to pick one.

Steady is built around that rather than pretending otherwise:

Every item shows its assumption — “assumed 2 cups, ~250 g” — so you can see what it guessed.
Every number is editable before it lands in your day, and after.
The grounding badge tells you whether the numbers came from a real lookup or an estimate.
Items are separate, so fixing the rice doesn’t mean rebuilding the whole plate.

And a wrong estimate matters less than it feels like it should. The adaptive budget learns from the relationship between your logging and your actual weight trend — so if you consistently under-log by 10%, Steady works out that your real burn rate is lower than the formula says and adjusts your budget to compensate. Consistency beats precision.

Next: Workouts & fueling →

Steady is a personal project by Hunter Baisden · hunter.baisden@gmail.com
Everything you log stays on your iPhone. Read the privacy policy.