Not Sure What to Eat? This App Knows What You're Craving A new tool uses a 'neural-network algorithm' to analyze millions of reviews and then recommend restaurants based on the foods you love the most.
By Jason Fell
Say you're in an unfamiliar town and hankering for a bite to eat. You turn to tools like Foursquare or Yelp for a friendly recommendation, but each restaurant you arrive at appears worse than the last. Can you really trust those yahoos on Yelp, anyway?
I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me and how infuriating it can be.
A Cambridge, Mass.-based company called Nara Logics is hoping to make this process easier. The company -- comprising a team of neuroscientists, computer scientists, astrophysicists, artists and entrepreneurs -- says it uses a new type of "neural-network algorithm" to analyze millions of reviews and descriptions, and then recommends restaurants based on the data you have entered into the site, according to a report from Forbes.
In other words, a new tool that's light years ahead of Yelp that eliminates the need for you to search for the restaurants you'll love most. It suggests them for you -- no searching time required.
Sounds amazingly useful to me.
To activate the service, all one needs to do is create a profile by registering through Nara's website or app, provide an email address and start filling out food preferences. Nara says your email is the only personal information it collects about its users (unless of course you consider your unhealthy obsession with, say, kale to be personal information).
The tool is already available in major U.S. cities like Boston, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, as well as smaller cities such as Savannah, Ga., Napa, Calif., and Portland, Ore.
As more people use Nara's app, presumably the stronger its capabilities will become. And with millions of people using other tools like Foursquare and UrbanSpoon and others, the potential market for a tool like this is pretty massive.
Now, if it could only guarantee me reservations...
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