I Tried Google’s New AI Health Coach, and It Left Me Utterly Baffled

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Google has launched its “Personal Health Agent”, an artificial intelligence coach available in the Fitbit app. It is currently in “preview” mode and is only available to Android users in the US with a Fitbit Premium subscription. This group includes me, so I gave it a try and it gave me a decent workout. He also told me that Pixel clock 4which Google produces and which I've reviewed, and which I am wearing now does not exist. So, when it comes to AI, this is normal.

How to enable a personal health coach in the Fitbit app

A “public preview” of this new coaching bot is available starting today for Fitbit Premium users in the US, provided they are using Android. (iOS support coming soon, Google says.) I'm a little confused about what to call this bot—the email I received from Google calls it “Personal Health Agent” and describes it as a “Google Health AI coach.” A Google Blog Post calls it a “Fitbit personal health coach.” It lives in the Fitbit app anyway.

When the AI ​​coach became available to me, I received a message at the top of the Today screen asking if I wanted to “try out the new Fitbit features before they become available to everyone.” If you missed this prompt, you can go to your profile picture in the top right corner of the app and select Public preview from the menu that appears.

By joining the public preview, you'll be taken into a completely different version—dare I call it a beta? – Fitbit applications. It doesn't yet include menstrual, mindfulness, nutrition, or community features, so you'll have to revert to an older version of the app to access them. You can switch between versions at any time from the menu under your profile icon.

Setting up my fitness goals

Google says its new chatbot can answer general health questions… but the same can be said for web search, so I'm not too excited about it. What am I did I want to see how well the bot can create a consistent exercise plan for me – this is an important feature that Google advertises. At first it worked out quite well.

The trainer asked the same questions I would expect from a personal trainer when creating a plan. He seemed to have a well structured approach and collected the following information:

• My main goal (I said that I would like to return to a regular habit after a break)

• My biggest problem (I said something about motivation and time)

• How many exercises am I used to doingincluding mileage and running pace (this was taken from my training data, but I am allowed to make corrections)

• What types of activities do I like to do?

• When I like to do them (he noticed that my strength training usually falls on Tuesday and Thursday)

• What equipment do I have available? (he concluded that I had space for outdoor running and equipment for strength training)

• How many days a week would I like to exercise?

He responded well to my changes during the conversation. I told him I wanted to alternate between strength training and running (with Saturdays off), starting with strength training today. It suggested focusing on the lower body to support my running, which I decided against. I named some of my favorite exercises and asked if I could build a strength program around them. We agreed: a six-day plan with strength training and running was approaching.

The bot told me it would take up to 10 minutes to create my plan, but it actually only took about two. My training this week was consistent with what we discussed, with a few differences. For example, I asked for pull-ups and they gave me assisted pull-ups. I also didn't like the six-rep sets of the squat and bench press, as I was hoping for heavier lifts with fewer reps. But there is a “Customize Plan” button, and with a few more moves back and forth, I was able to customize the workouts to my liking.

He has problems planning for the long term.

I was glad to review my plan – for me, a plan defines the steps to achieve a goal. As for the training plan, this will require achieving this goal over a period of several weeks or months. For example, marathon training plan Over time, your mileage will increase until you can run 26 miles. In my case, as long as I'm aiming for uniformity, almost anything will do. This is a simple mode for a trainer, AI or anyone else.

But what I received in the application was not what I would call plan. It was four workouts that took me from today to Saturday's rest day. There was no way to view the next week or the week after that, or to know how many weeks had passed. V this proposed plan. I didn't even get a chance to see the last two days of my six day plan.

I asked the bot what would happen next and it said it couldn't tell me anything about next week. What about the end this week? (In the end, we agreed on six days.) I was told that the week runs from Tuesday to Saturday. I started to feel like this bodybuilders argue about how many days there are in a week. After some conversations, he provided me with text descriptions of what Sunday and Monday workouts might look like, but they were incomplete, not even telling me what exercises I would be doing on the strength day. When I left the conversation and looked at the workouts in the app, I only had the original four.

I tried asking another question and the coach was able to give a general overview of what the next few weeks might consist of. Unfortunately, the adjustments we previously discussed were not taken into account, so it was described how the second week would be built on the basis originally programmed the first week, not how it would be based on the workouts that were actually on my calendar. If I were to compare this chatbot's plan to something like, say Reddit fitness wikialmost everything on the wiki would be more detailed.

There's no good way to track your workouts

I have written before about simple fitness tracking on Pixel Watch. (This applies to Fitbits such as Charge 6 too.) You can turn on a strength training mode on the watch, but you can't track rest time or mark what exercises you did, although there is some ability to create and execute running workouts.

With that in mind, I didn't expect to be able to track my strength training with my watch, but figured it was worth asking. The bot told me to just track a basic strength workout from the watch (which records heart rate and total time, and nothing else) and follow the exercises from my phone. Fair.

But wait! The app simply shows each exercise with a checkbox next to it. If you need to do three sets of six reps, you will only have one flag, not three. And there's no way to note what weight you used so you can increase it next time. The bot told me we'll do something progressive overloadbut how to progress if we don't track how much weight I'm using?

Okay, maybe it's hard for a simple bot to track strength, but running workouts should be easy, right? The old version of the Fitbit app (which you can still access if you leave the preview version) could recommend personalized running workouts and download them to your watch, so the watch would teach you different paces and intervals. I tried one when I wrote mine Pixel Watch 4 reviewso I know the device can do it. I was hoping for a similar experience here.

But when I asked the bot how to track my running workouts, things got weird. It gave me step-by-step instructions to find workouts on my Pixel watch, but the instructions were incorrect. For example, I was told to swipe up to access the app list, but that's not how you can access the app list. And it told me that my workout should appear on a certain screen, but there were no workouts on that screen.

I let the bot walk me through the troubleshooting process, which failed when I mentioned that my device was a Pixel Watch 4. That watch didn't exist, it told me. There are only Pixel Watch 1 and Pixel Watch 2.

What? Pixel Watch 3 was released over a year ago. Pixel Watch 4 is the current model. I'm wearing one right now. I asked the bot where it got information about Pixel Watch models, and it responded by admitting that it was seeing “non-existent Pixel Watch 4s.” Hm.

Bottom line: Promising technology if it ever works

As with many AI products these days, the best conclusion I can come to is that this would be a cool feature if it worked well, but currently it doesn't.

Here are a few things that are does handle competently at the moment: the adaptation conversation is well structured and collects the necessary information (at least this was the case in my rather simple situation). The bot understood what I meant when I used jargon like “heavy singles with some fallback.” It was able to pull data from my training history, such as mileage and the types of equipment I was likely to have access to.

But there's so much there can't do, including some really basic, fundamental things. He cannot plan for the long term, that is the whole point of a plan. It also fails to give me the ability to follow the workouts it offers.

This brings me back to the question of why anyone would want to use this AI trainer in the first place. Of course he can come up with idea for practice, but anyone who has ever entered a query into a search engine can do it. Looking for easy workout ideas online is like looking for grains of sand on the beach. Adding another one to the pile is not innovative.

But if A.I. could convert the generated workout into a format that I could follow using Google technologies (be it their app or watch), What a feature would be useful and it wouldn't duplicate something I can find in a million other places. The ability to track your progress over time would also be useful, but it means the app would have to record your weight for it to really be able to program progressive overload, not just talk about progressive overload. Things like this are what a personal fitness trainer should really provide, and that's not what this chatbot is for right now.