Foody Talk: Exploring Opportunities for Conversational Food Journaling

Digital food journaling can help support reflection and improvement of wellbeing relating to eating habits. However, it is often viewed as burdensome, and abandoned before gaining benefits. Advances in conversational user interfaces (CUIs) have the potential to support people journaling in a natural and interactive manner, but we lack understanding of how people would ideally prefer to use CUIs when journaling. We conducted 33 co-design sessions with 18 participants to ideate CUI interactions supportive of their health goals and in everyday situations. Our findings reveal that participants expect CUIs to be adaptive by learning goals and personal references, and support depth in detail and goal alignment while respecting situational constraints and intent. While participants expressed concern around navigating long-term data solely through conversations, they envisioned that CUIs could provide empathetic, non-judgmental feedback. We discuss opportunities for CUIs to support empathetic food journaling and accountability while following guardrails for delegated tasks.