is a senior reporter focusing on wearables, health tech, and more with 13 years of experience. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
I’m not a fan of AI health and fitness features. Not only do they regurgitate Captain Obvious-level summaries of what you just did, but the “insights” are so generalized that a Google search is often more helpful. So it was with great skepticism that I walked into a demo to learn about Fitbit’s forthcoming AI-powered personal health coach. To my surprise, I left cautiously curious about where Fitbit is going.
“We really want to move towards this world of coaching,” Andy Abramson, Google’s director of product management for Fitbit and Health, says during a demo of the feature. Professional athletes have a whole team of people helping to craft their fitness regimens. “We asked ourselves, what if everyone could have something like this?”
Dark mode will finally be a thing. Image: Google, Fitbit
On paper, Fitbit’s health coach isn’t offering anything a dozen other health and fitness tech companies haven’t already promised. It’s a chatbot built off Gemini that lives in a spiffy, redesigned Fitbit app (now with dark mode!). Each week, it builds custom routines with detailed workouts and workout targets based on your personal health goals. Those workouts will adjust based on your real-time data. So if you have a crap night of sleep, the next day it’ll tweak your suggested workout to compensate. You can also proactively tell the bot anytime you’re sick, injured, or have a new goal, and it will take those things into consideration. If it notices trends in your data, like improved sleep quality, it’ll flag them to you.
Fitbit’s coach is an attempt to address the age-old problem of wearables providing users way too much data without the appropriate context. What’s been sorely disappointing from competitors thus far has been the execution. Often, it feels like AI has been tacked on as a gimmick to please investors rather than developed as a tool that can provide genuinely helpful insights.
Where Google and Fitbit’s take feels different is that the product has been completely yet cautiously overhauled around the concept.
“It’s not just like a new coat of paint. It’s not just AI bolted on. We’ve really asked the question of: How do we put the AI coach in every part of the app?” Abramson says.
Fitbit’s coach really is prominently baked into every corner of the new app. The Today tab, which displays your daily metrics, has been reorganized into a smaller data dashboard with an AI chatbox right underneath. When you scroll down, there are blocks calling out insights based on metrics like sleep. Underneath each are prompts to engage with the coach further on each topic.
In our demo, Abramson shows me how the AI coach interprets his own personal data. Some parts seem like the same old regurgitated book reports. In others, however, I can see glimpses of the promise. For example, Abramson is able to tell the AI that his overarching goal is to get better at trail running, but that he’s traveling and has limited access to equipment. In response, the app suggested a workout incorporating the Peloton bike he has access to at the hotel. The coach also notes that because of jetlag, Abramson’s had less sleep the night before but with fewer interruptions compared to his usual. It then asks to check in on his energy levels for the day.
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