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A new AI-powered Personal Health Coach is headed to the Fitbit app for premium subscribers.
The feature combines Fitbit’s health analytics and Google’s Gemini AI to create a conversational, customizable digital wellness assistant. First teased alongside the Pixel Watch 4, the AI-powered Personal Health Coach is launching as a public preview tomorrow on Android with iOS availability to follow, and a full rollout slated for next year.
Available to subscribers of the $9.99 monthly Fitbit Premium service, the Health Coach overhauls the Fitbit app used to manage compatible smartwatches and fitness trackers. Google noted that not all Fitbit functionality has been rolled forward yet, but you can switch back to the old app at any time if you decide to try the preview. Google also promised new Fitbit-branded hardware for next year, although the company didn’t offer any specifics.
The preview experience still offers the basic functionality you’d expect from the Fitbit app, allowing you to check your vitals, see how well you slept, and log a workout. It also still offers Fitbit’s holistic health scores, including Daily Readiness to help you assess whether to prioritize a workout or rest, and Cardio Load to help you understand your cardiovascular strain.
The app will have more of a weekly outlook instead of a daily focus, and Cardio Load has been changed to a weekly value to reflect that. Moreover, AI has been intertwined with all of your data and holistic values, so you can use it as an avenue for inquiry or discussion.
The tabs of the new look app (Credit: Google)
The main Today tab surfaces relevant info to the top, so you might see your sleep data when you first check in the morning. You’ll see a button to talk to the assistant called Ask Coach, so you can check how it calculated your sleep score, and how that contributed to your readiness, for instance. The AI should be fluid enough to provide feedback on your data and use any value as a conversation starter to figure out ways you can improve it.
Aside from the main Today tab, the revamped app will be organized into tabs called Fitness, Sleep, and Health, with unique features tailored to give detailed advice in each area.
Fitness: Custom Training Plans
For the preview launch, the Fitness tab will be the most robust. It’s designed to act as a flexible personal trainer, and will create a plan for you a week at a time that focuses on your specific goals. Getting started requires filling out a detailed questionnaire. It takes your experience into account, as well as your basic demographics, such as age and weight. It will search back for past workouts logged in the Fitbit app and use that for background information, and it also asks about what fitness equipment you have.
Next, the assistant will dive into your specific goals. Google is promising much more granular options than to “lose weight” or “get in shape,” though you can stick to those general goals if you prefer. Or, you can specify you want to train for a marathon, strengthen your legs, work on your heart health, or try to get better at a sport like biking or running.
Google’s AI will use the info you provide to create your plan. Like similar features from Garmin and Polar, Google will let you target a specific date if you want to be ready for an upcoming marathon several months away, for instance, but you’ll only see your plan a week at a time. That weekly focus will allow the Coach to adapt the plan based on your progress and schedule on the fly.
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Google promises it can even adapt in the moment, so you can ask for an upper body workout that you can do in a hotel room, and it’ll respond. After it displays the workout plan for the week, you can discuss it with the Coach in case you’d like to make adjustments.
(Credit: Google)
The workouts pull from a library of hundreds of different movements and are tailored to your needs. It can prompt you to go for a run, or do a combination of squat thrusts, jumping jacks, and mountain climbers, for example. At any time, you can use the app to talk to the assistant about the plan and request changes. You can tell it you have a day full of meetings and won’t be able to work out, and it will shift everything accordingly to account for the rest day.
You can instruct the Coach to remember your favorite exercise routines and ask it to incorporate those workouts into future plans. It’s also ready as a general AI resource for fitness information if you want to ask about the difference between certain exercises, or details on the best form for one. In a controlled demo, the Coach seemed to be highly adaptable and offered detailed advice.
Google’s new Personal Health Coach follows other fitness AI launches, including Samsung’s Running Coach, which arrived alongside the Galaxy Watch 8, and Apple’s Workout Buddy in watchOS 26. Samsung’s software is designed to create a running plan for you. Apple’s Workout Buddy isn’t meant to be prescriptive, but instead keeps you updated on your stats with an encouraging, AI-generated voice as you work out.
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Both Samsung’s Running Coach and Apple’s Workout Buddy are available for free, while Google’s Personal Coach requires a premium subscription, but it stands to be much more robust in its capabilities, with a wide range of activity selections and advice designed to meet a range of goals. Google’s Gemini can already create workout plans; the Coach will operate from the same model and with Fitbit’s data to make its advice more specific to you.
I work with a personal trainer twice a week, and try to get in two other running workouts in the interim. According to Google, the Personal Health Coach can create a plan that uses my personal trainer workouts as part of the equation, and guides me toward better fitness during my two other exercise sessions. I’ll be excited to try it and see if it can actually adapt to my personal brand of chaotic scheduling and inconsistent motivation, so stay tuned for more.
Sleep: Searchable Insights
The Sleep tab will pair Fitbit’s current capabilities with Gemini’s searchability. As before, it’ll show you the details of your different sleep cycles and stats, as captured by your wearable, with a focus on your overall overnight health over the past week. The Coach will let you ask for more details about any of the data.
(Credit: Google)
You can ask conversational questions such as “Why did I wake up tired?” or “What can I do to get more sleep?” Gemini will combine your data with searchable information to provide an answer, including concrete tips for the latter query. The Coach can also summarize your sleep patterns and explain their impact on fitness metrics, such as Cardio Load.
Over time, the Coach will be able to offer even more personalized advice based on your sleep needs, while taking into account restful periods of your day and naps. At that point, it could be more detailed than Samsung’s existing Sleep Coach, but at launch, I expect Samsung to have the edge. The Samsung Sleep Coach can already offer a tailored checklist of habits to help improve your sleep based on the data gathered by a Galaxy wearable.
Health: Vitals and More
Finally, the Health tab will be the place to check your vitals and other statistics gathered by your wearable device. It’ll show your data over time and make it easy to see changes, but this tab will be the least affected by the Health Coach. The Coach will still be on hand to answer questions about your data and provide feedback on queries, such as “What are good questions to ask my doctor at my annual checkup?”
(Credit: Google)
Since it’s launching as a preview, the Personal Health Coach will be a work in progress, but the fitness planning aspects, in particular, sound much more robust than anything else I’ve tested. I’m looking forward to trying it out and will dive into how it works in practice once I’ve gotten the chance to put it through the paces of my schedule. Stay tuned.
About Our Expert
Andrew Gebhart
Senior Writer, Smart Home and Wearables
Experience
I’m PCMag’s senior writer covering smart home and wearable devices. I’ve been reporting on tech professionally for nearly a decade and have been obsessing about it for much longer than that. Prior to joining PCMag, I made educational videos for an electronics store called Abt Electronics in Illinois, and before that, I spent eight years covering the smart home market for CNET.
I foster many flavors of nerdom in my personal life. I’m an avid board gamer and video gamer. I love fantasy football, which I view as a combination of role-playing games and sports. Plus, I can talk to you about craft beer for hours and am on a personal quest to have a flight of beer at each microbrewery in my home city of Chicago.
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