Google’s taking a big swing at AI health with the Fitbit Air

It’s a Whoop dupe. That was my first thought after I noticed the new $99 Google Fitbit Air. You can hardly blame me. The band is screenless with a metallic material clasp. My eyes flickered between the Fitbit Air and my wrist, the place I’m sporting a Whoop MG. Was I not seeing double?

But as my press briefing went on, my opinion began altering. The Air is form of like the OG Fitbits that Whoop then duped as soon as Fitbit went all in on smartwatches. Think again to 2012, when the Fitbit One might clip to your pants, be became a pendant, or dangle from a keychain. That gadget was largely a pedometer, whereas the Air is extra of a fashionable, modular sensor that may be popped out of 1 band and caught into one in all three others. But in some ways, this seems like a return to Fitbit’s roots — a easy band for informal monitoring.

“The reality is right now, wearables have made huge advancements, but for a lot of people, they’re still either too complicated, too bulky, or too expensive,” Rishi Chandra, Google’s vice chairman of Health and Home, tells The Verge. “That’s where the Fitbit Air came in. We wanted something you could give to your kids and parents that they could just put on their arms. They don’t have to learn anything new.”

Compared to earlier Fitbit trackers, the Air is 25 % smaller than the Luxe and 50 % smaller than the Inspire. It weighs a mere 12g with the band, and 5.2g with out. There are not any buttons, although there’s an LED charging gentle and haptics for silent alarms. Sensor-wise, it isn’t as excessive tech as the Pixel Watch, nevertheless it’s obtained the staples: an optical coronary heart charge sensor, gyroscope, accelerometer, blood oxygen sensor, and pores and skin temperature sensor for sleep monitoring. You can dunk it in water as much as 50 meters, and the battery lasts seven days on a single cost. That’s considerably disappointing, nevertheless it was typical for old-school Fitbits, too. At least this one purportedly will get you someday of juice with a five-minute cost. It’ll additionally work concurrently with a Pixel Watch — which means that for those who’d desire to put on the latter throughout the day and an Air for exercises and sleep, now you can. (Recently, Fitbit hasn’t supported a number of gadgets.)

But the Air is just not a sign that Google’s reviving Fitbit because it was. This is Fitbit’s first {hardware} product in almost 4 years, nevertheless it comes alongside the dying of the Fitbit app. Starting May nineteenth, the Fitbit app and Android’s Health Connect app will probably be consolidated into the single Google Health app. The Fitbit Premium subscription? That’s additionally being rebranded as Google Health Premium, though the value will not change. To prime all of it off, its AI-powered Health Coach is leaving beta and rolling out to the public.

This is hardly shocking. Since Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion in 2021, it has been slowly however absolutely integrating Fitbit into the overarching Google umbrella, a lot because it did with Nest. The transition hasn’t all the time been easy. Longtime Fitbit users were angry by a number of in style outages, deprecated options like challenges, and a confused wearable lineup as soon as the Pixel Watch was launched. Then, in early 2024, Fitbit’s authentic management was laid off.

“I know it will be hard for people. It was hard for us internally,” says Chandra, referring to the rebrand. “But as we think about the future, where the health app needs to go, the health app is not going to be specific to Fitbit hardware… We want to be a health coach to an Apple Watch user, too. That’s why we had to make the brand change.”

Another purpose, Chandra says, is that the present health information market is completely too fragmented. Before now, Google itself had two separate apps: Fitbit and Health Connect. Before that, it was the Google Fit app. Many wearable customers have their information saved throughout a hodgepodge of apps, together with Strava, Garmin, Peloton, and so on. Their medical data are sometimes saved on different techniques. In some circumstances, health app information will be siloed relying in your telephone’s working system. Which is why, Chandra says, Google Health will probably be iOS appropriate and finally work with third-party wearables like Garmins, Whoops, and Oura. (To begin, nevertheless, it will be restricted to Pixel and Fitbit gadgets.) This platform-agnostic strategy additionally harkens again to the Fitbit of yore. It’s simply that this time, it is below Google’s title.

Even so, the Google Health app will not come as a shock to many Fitbit customers. There’s been a public preview beta since October. In a briefing, Google mentioned almost 500,000 customers had participated in the beta, and the firm obtained over a million bits of suggestions. Based on that suggestions, Google says the last model will add again lacking options (the preview didn’t embody cycle monitoring, for example), extra flexibility with the health teaching, a extra customizable interface for highlighting metrics, a extra correct sleep algorithm, and a much less chatty AI coach.

“For us, this is not a ‘We’re launching this and seeing you in six months or a year, then hopefully we’ll update it,’ Chandra says, emphasizing that the plan is to continue pushing out frequent updates based on feedback.

By bundling these three announcements, Chandra says Google is trying to write a distinct narrative. In a nutshell: Here’s a simple, affordable device for the average person that pairs with a consolidated health data platform, complete with a built-in AI coach. Buy in, and you’ll get the most streamlined, low-effort way to get personalized insights and take control of your health. In this case, you can get adaptive fitness plans, chat with the AI ​​about your medical records, use your phone camera to log meals, and ask how your various health metrics relate to each other.

Google is far from the only wearable maker attempting this — and in a parallel universe, I’d bet that an independent Fitbit would be embarking on this road too. But, like Apple, Google is one of the only players that could do good on the data consolidation part of the equation. But the part that everyone’s currently stumbling on is the AI. I’ve tested nearly all the major AI health, fitness, and nutrition coaches. They are either hallucinatory dogshit or useless book reports. That’s not to mention data privacy fears regarding sensitive health information. (On that front, Google says it will continue to keep Fitbit data siloed from its ad business; AI model training is opt-in and turned off by default.)

“This is a very hard problem,” Chandra concedes when pushed on this. “The reason why we did the public preview is that we need to make sure we didn’t make big mistakes. The rigor here is absolutely critical… but we are going to make mistakes. We’ll try to clarify those mistakes when we can, and we’ll try to own up to them and keep improving the product as we go.”

It’s a big swing. Personalized health is the holy grail of the wearable and health business proper now. Every new wearable launch, optimized metric, and AI characteristic is hurting towards this purpose. I’m not a fortune teller. I do not understand how Google’s health gambits will play out. What I do know — and Google will probably disagree with me — is that the outdated Fitbit period is unquestionably over.