Alongside the Pixel Watch 4 (and family of Pixel 10 devices), Google also introduced a new “personal health coach” today at its Made By Google event. A preview of it will begin rolling out in October as part of the Fitbit app to Premium users in the US. The app is also getting a redesign which the company says will be “available with the latest Fitbit trackers, Fitbit smart watches and Pixel watches.”
The first thing Fitbit users may notice is a visual refresh. In place of the current organization system, the bottom of the screen will feature four tabs: Today, Fitness, Sleep and Health. The home page (Today) will still feature daily progress stats in the form of bars and rings at the top, though these are now customizable so you can display your favorite metrics there.
Below this is a feed of your upcoming workouts, recent activity and progress reports served in individual cards that you can tap into for more information. This layout, with data visualizations at the top and a feed that follows, is the same across all four tabs.
Three screenshots showing the new redesigned Fitbit app, with the first showing the new home screen in dark mode, the middle showing a Fitness-specific card in dark mode and the rightmost shows a card offering suggestions around Sleep and activity. (Google)
At a recent demo, the company’s director of product management for Fitbit and health Andy Abramson showed us how his app surfaced his weekly cardio load in a ring, with bars to its right for his steps, readiness and sleep performance. “We call these our focus metrics,” he said. These are in a color scheme that will be familiar to Fitbit users, with purple continuing to be the color representing sleep data and teal for steps. But there’s a few more updates that Google says “address common user suggestions,” and these include easier layouts, more intuitive data visualization, “improved syncing — and of course, dark mode.”
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Google didn’t just give the Fitbit app a makeover. It said that coaching and AI were at the core of the redesign, and that the “entire app was rebuilt so the health coach can understand your goals, build your plan, contextualize your metrics and bring insights at the right moments.”
Abramson said that his team sought to figure out “How do we put the AI coach in every part of the app?” Instead of simply tucking the AI features into a dedicated tab, “We actually need to tie it together.”
To that end, a floating “Ask Coach” button is on every page of the app at the bottom right, and tapping it will take you into a conversation window with the Gemini-powered AI. This button is accessible across all the tabs in the updated app, and you can ask it questions about all the data you’ve provided to Fitbit.
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