Google has launched its "Personal Health Agent," an AI coach available in the Fitbit app. Currently it's in a "preview" mode, and limited to Android users in the U.S. who have a Fitbit Premium subscription. That group includes me, so I tried it, and it gave me some decent workouts. It also told me that the Pixel Watch 4, which Google makes, and which I reviewed, and which am currently wearing, does not exist. So, par for the course when it comes to AI.
The "public preview" of this new coaching bot is available starting today for Fitbit Premium users in the U.S., provided they use Android. (Support for iOS is coming soon, Google says.) I'm a little unclear on what to call this bot -- an email I got from Google calls it their "Personal Health Agent" and describes it as "Google Health's AI coach." A Google blog post calls it Fitbit's "personal health coach." In any case, it lives in the Fitbit app.
When the AI coach became available for me, I received a message at the top of my Today screen asking if I'd like to "try new Fitbit features before they're available to everyone." If you missed that prompt, you can go to your profile pic at the top right corner of the app and select Public Preview from the menu that appears.
Joining the public preview launches you into an entirely different version -- dare I call it a beta? -- of the Fitbit app. It doesn't yet include menstrual health, mindfulness, nutrition, or community features, so to access those, you'll need to switch back to the old version of the app. You can swap between versions at any time from the menu under your profile icon.
Google says the new chatbot can answer general questions about health...but so can a web search, so I wasn't too excited about that. What I did want to see was how well the bot could set up a coherent exercise plan for me -- that's the big feature Google is touting. It did pretty well, at first.
The coach asked the same kinds of questions I would expect a personal trainer to cover when putting together a plan. It seemed to have a nicely structured approach, and gathered this information:
It responded well to my adjustments during the conversation. I told it I'd like to alternate strength training and running (with Saturdays off), starting today with a strength training session. It suggested a lower body focus to support my running, which I declined. I named some of my favorite lifts and asked if it could build the strength program around those. We were agreed -- a six-day plan with strength and running was coming right up.
The bot told me it would take up to 10 minutes to generate my plan, but it only took about two. My workouts for the week matched what we'd discussed, with a few discrepancies. For example, I asked for pull-ups and it gave me assisted pull-ups. I also didn't like the six-rep sets of squat and bench press, since I was hoping for heavier lifts with fewer reps. But there is an "adjust plan" button, and with some more back-and-forth, I was able to get it to tweak the workouts to my liking.
I was excited to look over my plan -- to me, a plan sets out the steps to accomplish a goal. For a training plan, that would involve building toward that goal over a matter of weeks or months. For example, a marathon training plan would increase your mileage over time until you can run a strong 26 miles. In my case, with a goal of consistency, almost anything would fit the bill. This is easy mode for a trainer, AI or otherwise.
But what I got in the app was not what I would call a plan. It was four workouts, taking me from today to my rest day on Saturday. There was no way to view next week, or the week after that, or to see how many weeks were even in this alleged plan. I didn't even have a way to see the last two days of my six-day plan.
I asked the bot what was coming up next, and it said it wasn't able to tell me anything about next week. What about the end of this week? (We agreed on six days, after all.) It told me that the week is Tuesday through Saturday. I began to feel like those bodybuilders arguing over how many days are in a week. After some back-and-forth, it delivered me text descriptions of what Sunday and Monday's workouts might look like, but they were incomplete, not even naming what lifts I'd be doing on the strength day. When I exited the conversation and looked at the workouts in the app, I only had the original four.
I tried asking another way, and the coach was able to give a broad overview of what the next few weeks might contain. Unfortunately the adjustments we'd previously discussed weren't factored in, so it described how the second week would build on the originally programmed first week, not how it would build on the workouts that were actually on my calendar. If I were comparing this chatbot's plan to something from, say, the Reddit fitness wiki, pretty much anything on the wiki would have been more comprehensive.
I've written before about the Pixel Watch's barebones fitness tracking. (This applies to Fitbits like the Charge 6 as well.) You can turn on a strength training mode on the watch, but you can't track rest times or note what exercises you did, though there is some ability to create and follow running workouts.
With that in mind, I didn't expect to be able to follow the strength workouts from my watch, but I 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, nothing else) and follow the exercises from my phone. Fair enough.
But wait! The app just shows each exercise with a checkbox next to it. If you're supposed to do three sets of six reps, you only get one checkbox, not three. And there's no way to note how much weight you used so you can build on it next time. The bot told me we'd be doing some progressive overload, but how to progress if we're not tracking how much weight I'm using?
OK, maybe strength is hard for a simple bot to track, but running workouts should be straightforward, right? The old version of the Fitbit app (which you can still access if you quit the preview) could recommend personalized running workouts and load them onto your watch, so that the watch coaches you through the different paces and intervals. I tried one out when writing my Pixel Watch 4 review, so I know the device can do it. I was hoping for a similar experience here.
But when I asked the bot about how to follow the running workouts, things got weird. It gave me step-by-step instructions to find the workouts on my Pixel watch, but the instructions were wrong. For example, it told me to swipe up to access the app list, but that's not how you 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 talk me through a troubleshooting process, which derailed when I mentioned that my device was a Pixel Watch 4. That watch doesn't exist, it told me. There is only a Pixel Watch 1 and a Pixel Watch 2.
What? The Pixel Watch 3 was released more than a year ago. The Pixel Watch 4 is the current model. I am wearing one right now. I asked the bot where it was getting its information about Pixel Watch models, and it responded by admitting to hallucinating the "nonexistent 'Pixel Watch 4.'" Hmm.
As with many AI products these days, the best conclusion I can offer is that this would be a cool feature if it worked well -- but it currently doesn't.
Here are a few things that it does handle competently at the moment: The onboarding conversation is well structured and gathers the right information (or at least it did for my fairly simple situation). The bot understood what I meant when I used lingo like "heavy singles with some back-offs." It was able to pull data from my workout history, like my running mileage and the types of equipment I'm likely to have access to.
But there's so much it can't do, including some really basic, fundamental things. It can't plan for the long term, which is the whole point of a plan. It also can't give me a way to follow the workouts it comes up with.
This brings me back to the question of why somebody would want to use this AI coach in the first place. Sure, it can come up with an idea for a workout, but so can anybody who has ever typed a query into a search engine. Finding simple workout ideas on the internet is like searching for grains of sand on a beach. Adding another to the pile isn't innovative.
But if the AI could convert the workout it generated into a format I could follow with Google's tech (be it their app or watch), that function 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 that means the app would have to record your weights so it can actually program progressive overload, not just talk about progressive overload. Things like that are what a personal fitness coach really needs to provide, and this chatbot just isn't right now.
