Google Launches AI Fitbit Coach
Google launched its AI-powered Fitbit Coach on iPhones, beating Apple to intelligent fitness coaching for iOS users. The feature, powered by Google's Gemini AI, provides personalized recommendations, voice guidance, and adaptive workout plans, with UK users receiving the biggest Fitbit update in years.
- The AI coaching feature is exclusive to Fitbit Premium subscribers, a service that costs $9.99 per month. - This feature, which first launched for Android users in the United States in October 2025, has now expanded to iOS users and to several other countries including the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. - The AI coach is a conversational chatbot that can create customized workout plans and adapt them based on user feedback and changing goals. - The underlying technology is Google's Gemini AI, which has been specifically fine-tuned for health and fitness applications, a process that involved 1 million human annotations and over 100,000 hours of human evaluation. - While the AI coach is now widely available, it is still in a "Public Preview" phase, meaning Google is actively collecting user feedback to refine the feature. - In addition to the workout coach, Google is testing other experimental AI features for Fitbit under "Fitbit Labs," including a "Medical Record Navigator" to simplify lab results and a "Symptom Checker". - The launch comes as reports suggest Apple is scaling back its own plans for a similar AI-powered health coaching service, which was rumored to be a major feature for iOS 27. - The AI coach analyzes a user's holistic health data, including sleep patterns and stress levels, to inform its workout recommendations, aiming to provide a more comprehensive approach to fitness.
