The Fitbit faithful began expressing concerns almost immediately when Google announced it had acquired the brand in 2021. Many of their fears became a reality last month when the tech giant completely supplanted the Fitbit app with its new Google Health, an AI-focused vitals-tracking suite that removed the final vestiges of Fitbit-ness from the software.
At the same time, Google has been ramping up to take on a new breed of AI fitness products from the likes of Whoop, Oura and Ultrahuman, which appeal to athletes looking for insight into their performance but are also trickling down to regular consumers.
With its new Whoop-like Fitbit Air band (Google is keeping the branding for some hardware products, at least for now) and a revamped $15-per-month fitness-tracking subscription, the tech giant is hoping to stake a claim as the go-to for AI health insights before Apple gets to the market. I’ve been testing it for a few weeks, and it does effectively pull a lot of information into one place. Whether the output is ultimately going to be useful for you is a bit less clear.
Meet your Google Health coach
Anyone with a Google wearable using the Google Health app gets some basic tracking. Depending on your band’s capabilities, you’ll get step, distance, heart rate, sleep, breathing and blood oxygen tracking, and the app will use it all to score your daily readiness so you can adjust workout plans.
But if you pay monthly for the subscription, you get access to the large library of video tutorials previously called Fitbit Premium Workouts, as well as the new AI coach experience. In the app, it’s just called Coach, but I think of it as the regular Google Gemini wearing a baseball cap and a whistle. It sounds like Gemini, it’s just as verbose and misleadingly confident as Gemini, but it has quick access to all the data collected about your vitals.
Google sells this as the ability to “ask personalised health questions 24/7 and receive science-backed answers and evidence-based insights”. The idea is that if you tell Coach you’re recovering from a broken arm or are struggling to get a fitness routine going because you get puffed out too easily, it will tailor exercise plans to you with that in mind. It also takes into account the readings your band has taken on your vitals, any information imported to Google Health from other apps, your local weather forecast, how well you slept and more. I know this, because Coach mentions all of these details constantly.
Using Google Health took a bit of getting used to, primarily because of the AI. Instead of waking up to a quick sleep score or exercise reminder, I’m now waking up to notifications that can only show the first few lines of massive Gemini waffle-dumps that talk about the implications of my sleep on my body’s ability to work, and make suggestions about activities for the day. I also get these sermons before bed (maybe put your runners by the door so you don’t forget!) and after workouts. If it was a real trainer sending me these texts, I would tell them to chill out.
Based on what I told Coach about my fitness goals, it created two tasks for me in the first week – walk for a total of nine kilometres, and complete two strength-focused workouts. The system’s good in theory, because rather than asking me to set a fitness goal, it just tells me what to aim for, and it gets automatically adjusted the following week.
The app’s “readiness” metric also seems to work generally well. Coach noticed that an unusually high amount of activity on a weekend (I was unexpectedly roped in to assist at a Scouts camp) resulted in my heart rate staying high overnight. It told me to skip physical activity and drink lots of water on Monday, and my vitals had snapped back to normal by Tuesday.
I haven’t used the system long enough to say whether it’s helped me get in shape, but I am starting to have a couple of concerns about how the coach operates. It almost never pushes back on anything I say, and is highly suggestible to changes I want to make to its routines. It’s not consistent. I’ve occasionally caught it making mistakes and then removing its posts. Like all generative AI, it’s difficult to tell if it’s right or if it just has the semantic markers of being right.
Coach in the machine
Aside from general AI issues, the app also has a specific problem that will probably improve over time; the new Gemini coach isn’t particularly well integrated into what is still largely the same old app. When I received my strength training goal, the coach suggested a few options for workouts, but it looked like a lot of reading and explaining so I asked if strength workouts from the video library counted. It said they absolutely did. However, as I completed them, my goals didn’t update.
When I asked the coach about this, it said that it only gets information on my vitals from which it deduces I’m working out. It doesn’t get information from the Fitbit videos about what I’m actually doing. I told it which videos I’d done and asked it to update the checklist, which it promised to do, but later admitted it couldn’t.
When pushed, the coach told me that real progress and doing the work was more important than ticking boxes (which is true enough) but that if I wanted the boxes ticked I would need to agree that I’d done the specific activities it described in the plan.
From a certain perspective, you might view this as a benefit. At least I got an explanation as to why the app hadn’t behaved as expected. But on the other hand, what reason do I have to trust its explanations? It was wrong about its own capabilities at least twice, despite saying things that sounded plausible. Is that also the case when it tells me something about my body’s vital signs?
As another example, at one point after a long walk, the coach congratulated me and said that I had “likely” completed half of my weekly distance goal. That struck me as odd, so I checked the workout summary and saw it had the walk listed as zero kilometres. When I asked the coach, it gave me a plausible explanation; that I may have location permissions disabled, or maybe I had selected “walk” instead of “outdoor walk” so the system didn’t activate GPS tracking.
I knew this was bogus, because the summary had a detailed map of where I had walked. I pointed this out to the coach and it replied — somewhat bizarrely — “that is definitely a classic ghost in the machine moment”. What? I guessed the distance and logged it manually.
As a method of summarising all your fitness data and helping you plan your activities, the new Google Health is effective enough. But as a stand-in for a coach or trainer, it’s exactly like using Gemini as a stand-in for an artist, editor or counsellor. Uncanny.
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Tim Biggs is a writer covering consumer technology, gadgets and video games.Connect via X or email.
