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After spending all night working on a story about my time working with… Upcoming Google smart glassesI woke up exhausted from five hours of sleep. The Google Health app was sure to notify me of that: “You’re getting quality sleep but not enough,” the app said when I opened it. I paid attention.
I was encouraged to drink water, calm down and go to bed early. I appreciated the summary, and it felt a little different than any other fitness tracker I’ve used before.
the New Fitbit Air Comfortable and easy to forget when it’s on your wrist, however Restart the Google Health app It is associated with real change. Deep AI summaries of daily health progress – written using generative AI – are the biggest focus. Subscription-based AI training sounds like the kind of feature I’ve been wanting in wearables for years. Now that it’s here, I wish it would be placed on the now-retired Fitbit app instead of being presented as a completely separate experience.
I told Google Health that my muscles felt heavier, and that seemed to have helped me once again.
Gemini’s AI feedback is useful, but it can be unwanted
The textual AI summaries of activity and sleep data are a smart idea, and the ability to chat with the AI about trends in my history feels really new. But I don’t find myself wanting to chat with him; I would just look at the notes and act accordingly.
I told Google Health that I did some weight training one day, and it logged the activity based on my description. But beyond that, I wasn’t particularly interested in telling her how I felt or what my plans were. Mentioning this exercise just once prompted Google Health to repeatedly remind me of the same weights every day, instead of suggesting other activities I might want to try.
However, the text may look messy. Additionally, I like the charts and clear stats layouts. Fitbit has always excelled at this, and while Google Health still provides some of those stats on tap, the quick dashboard is largely gone.
The Fitbit Air is comfortable and invisible, which helps me wear it all the time. His sleep observations are also impressive.
Gemini mostly manages to wear me out
After a week of terrible sleeping habits – an amazing period At Google I/O Followed by a weekend of college reunions at Princeton, where I didn’t go to bed until about 3 a.m. every night — Google Health really helped me understand how much I needed to recover. It also highlighted which of those short nights of sleep seemed to be the most healing.
I love Google Health’s sleep analysis.
I appreciated her advice on rest, recovery, and taking better care of myself. Once the meeting was over, I went to bed early and got sleep that Google Health deemed beneficial. I also noticed that I woke up late during deep sleep, which can make you feel groggy – and to be fair, I was groggy most of Sunday.
But Google Health also interpreted my 19-minute walk at 1:44 a.m. late Saturday — or technically very early Sunday — as “a solid way to get through Sunday.” In fact, it was just taking 17,000 steps a day when I was exhausted and trying to find a home in an Uber, which didn’t feel like a healthy transition at all.
Not wild about this health dashboard.
The new app seems incomplete
I like the AI summaries, but I’d prefer to see them tucked into a sidebar or separate panel while the standard Fitbit summaries remain front and center. Then again, if that happened, Google probably wouldn’t be able to put its AI health coach in your face as aggressively as it does now — which is exactly what I don’t like. I don’t want my health journey to look like food. I want it to feel like a dashboard.
Yes, the Google Health app has dashboards for sleep and health stats that can be brought up with a single tap, but they don’t feel as comprehensive and distilled as what Fitbit once offered at a glance. And without a screen on my Fitbit Air, I need stats readouts on the phone more than ever.
I think this is an evolutionary step. Other wearable devices (including smart glasses) may use on-demand displays that provide the readings I want. But instead, what if Google’s Gemini layer was called upon when needed? As Apple prepares for its next release of WatchOS and wearable devices such as Oura ring Keep advancing the features, and AI-infused summaries and workouts will inevitably be the future of health tech.
But I don’t trust the AI enough to chat with it in depth, and the text summaries and advice can get cumbersome. How about incorporating these notes into helpful infographics? Or just bring back the Fitbit and add Gemini to it?
There’s still time to look into this, Google. Not everything has to be an AI feed, although Google I/O made that clear This is the trend that Google wants to push.
