MyFitnessPal Adds Alexa “Skill”

In common with a lot of people I’ve got a MyFitnessPal account. I’ve been a user for several years, though I go through phases with it. Sure, I can login to it daily, but I don’t log all my food and water using it a lot of the time. I will some of the time, but I tend to forget and then it’s too late, so I don’t.

A couple of weeks back MyFitnessPal announced that they’ve created an Alexa “skill”. I was curious to see what it could do so here’s the overview.

For now the skill is only available to users with an Alexa account in the US. So if you’re in Ireland or the UK you cannot enable it. I reached out to them to find out when they plan to add support for Ireland and UK users and the response I got back was non-committal:

Since we just recently rolled out the feature, we’re still working on getting it out worldwide. Unfortunately we weren’t able roll it out internationally when we first launched it.

If you are able to use the skill with your Alexa powered device it’s called “MyFitnessPal Lite” and it offers some basic features for now.

You can log water intake, log your weight and check your diary stats.

You cannot log food, which is really what I suspect a lot of users would want to do with it.

Here’s the command overview:

To log water, you can say:
Alexa, tell MyFitnessPal to log water.
Alexa, tell MyFitnessPal to log 3 cups of water
To log weight, you can say:
Alexa, tell MyFitnessPal to log my weight.
Alexa, tell MyFitnessPal to log my weight of 170 pounds.
To check your diary stats, you can say:
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal how am I doing today?
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal for my diary summary.
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal how many steps have I taken today?
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal how much water did I drink today?
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal how many calories have I consumed for today?
To get started, ask Alexa to open MyFitnessPal. You can say:
Alexa, open MyFitnessPal.
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal.
Alexa, launch MyFitnessPal.

Source: Amazon

Being able to use an Alexa device to log or get feedback on your weight loss or general fitness progress makes sense, so I’d hope they’ll roll out more features AND make it available for those of us outside the US!