Fitbit’s smartphone app has undergone several redesigns over the past two years, and now there’s another big one coming in October, timed to the launch of the newly announced Pixel Watch 4. Launching as an opt-in review (an open beta), the design centers on Google’s AI-powered Personal Health Coach, built with Gemini.
The entire app has been rebuilt from the ground up with the new AI coaching feature. Andy Abramson, director of product management at Google, says the redesign also offers easier app navigation, better data visualization, improved syncing between wearable devices, and (finally) a dark mode. Those are all purportedly common user suggestions from existing Fitbit customers.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
This Personal Health Coach feature is available only to Fitbit Premium subscribers. The idea behind the assistant—which doesn’t quite have a personality or even a name—is to let users ask anything and everything about health and fitness and receive personalized guidance thanks to the 24/7 health data collected by your Fitbit wearable or Pixel Watch. During the onboarding, the coach will ask you questions so it can better understand your preferences and equipment, but this is a conversation that will continually evolve.
When the coach presents your data with insights, like your sleep score from the night before or the data from your most recent workout, you can start a conversation, and that data will be incorporated into the coach’s responses. That conversation could then include tailoring the workouts for the week if your sleep score wasn’t great. If you’re just not feeling up to it or are under the weather, just tell the coach, and it’ll make tweaks to the workout plan and even follow up about how you’re feeling after some time.
Courtesy of Julian Chokkattu
These conversations resemble the chat window for when you talk to Gemini, and the responses can be verbose. Rishi Chandra, vice president for Health at Google, says the company had to balance a fine line between responses that were too short and weren’t insightful, and extremely lengthy responses. Right now, you can only type to the Coach, but the experience is still in a preview state. Chandra says the company is exploring multimodal interactions—think sending a video of your hotel gym equipment and asking for workout recommendations—and potentially incorporating Gemini Live for a more real-time conversation experience.
Much of the new Fitbit app experience also centers around customization. The Focus Metric at the top of the home page, which shows you your performance for the day, can be customized to show whatever data you prefer. Likewise, if the Coach serves you a workout plan for the week, just start a conversation to make any adjustments. The Coach also looks at your performance on a weekly basis rather than a single day, giving users more flexibility in hitting their goals. (That includes last year’s Cardio Load feature on the Pixel Watch.)
The Coach will be able to tap into your historical Fitbit data, however long it dates back. There’s a Coaches Notes section that allows you to see everything you’ve ever told the Coach, and you can delete these at any time. Google still has to follow the data separation commitments established when it acquired Fitbit, meaning your health data cannot be used for Google Ads and is stored separately from other Google data.
