Instead of Fitbit’s AI health coach, you can just have friends

Someone needs to Say it. Someone has to speak up in defense of being in the middle. I’m a mid runner. Most of us are, because that’s the definition of mean. I exercise every day, but I have a full-time job, two kids, a dog, and a husband. I’m a volunteer, and I have dinner with my parents. I am aging. I won’t be knocking anyone’s socks off with a crazy 100 miler any time soon.

So what do you do if you don’t want to collapse into a bag of dust, but you don’t have the time or motivation to work with a personal trainer? One option is to do what Atlantic CEO and sprinter Nicholas Thompson does, and Use custom GPT. Or you can use the new Google AI health coach In the Fitbit app, which is part of $10 per month Fitbit Premium service.

Per Google’s instructions, I used Coach (found at General inspection-Beta, of sorts) for three weeks. I’m a coach Girls on the run At my daughter’s school, where she became friends with a kid competing in the Junior Olympics. I made it my mission to beat two kids in the November 5th race, at a 7:30 mile pace. I was feeling pretty good about it, in fact, until several people told me that I should stop talking to the computer and that I needed to talk to people in real life.

First things first

You can access Fitbit’s Public Preview if you meet a few requirements — you must be an active Fitbit Premium subscriber, and have Android phone Runs Android 11 or higher, is located in the US, and uses English for both the Fitbit app and your phone. (You can check The full list of requirements is here.)

You can also switch back and forth between the public preview and the regular app version, which you may want to do since several important features are currently missing from the app version with Coach. For example, menstrual health and blood glucose recording are not available, as are Cardio Fitness scores and advanced running metrics for Pixel Watch 3 and 4 users.

I have used the service with pixel watch 4 On a Pixel 9. (Fitbit wants to make the experience available to iOS users soon.) I’ve had a good experience with Running coach Which Fitbit launched last year, but I was more optimistic about the health coach because it promised to be more comprehensive and more flexible.

Many runners who are smarter and more experienced than me (please see middle comment above) have noted that running requires the ability to answer a lot of binary yes/no questions correctly. Can I take my long flight on Saturday if I am busy on Sunday? Should I run with sniffles, or wait until I’m healthy? More guidance is always helpful. I answered a 10-minute questionnaire about my goals and the equipment I had available (Fitbit hopes it can eventually incorporate multimodal routines, like taking a video of gym equipment, and use AI to make suggestions) and waited for the results.

Bumps in the road

Via Adrian Su

Via Adrian Su

My first impressions were not promising. The coach seemed to think I was at a business conference, which I wasn’t, and I told him so. I didn’t mind, though, because it was so easy to adapt my running and hotel room workouts to outdoor runs and easy weightlifting sessions in front of the TV.

You can track live metrics via the Fitbit app, or you can just use your watch to track your workout and sync the completed workout to your program later. I really like this feature. Many people like live tracking exercises; I find this very cumbersome and inaccurate, especially since I don’t run track and have a hard time getting set intervals/distance while running in my neighborhood.