Google’s new Health Coach is too needy

I’ve been wearing the Fitbit Air for over a month now, and I’m not really sure how I feel about the overall experience. The device itself is exactly what I hoped it’d be after it initially leaked, but the rebrand of the Fitbit app to Google Health — combined with the Gemini-powered health coach — hasn’t lived up to the hype I built up for it in my head.

I use Gemini daily for a long list of tasks. Some technical, some not. So when I started using the Gemini-powered Health Coach in the new Google Health app, I was excited to see what it’d do with all of my fitness data.

After initially setting up the Air in the Health app, I immediately imported all of my Apple Health data dating back to 2011 into the app, anticipating the coach would immediately see the ebbs and flows of my fitness journey and start providing actionable insights.

Only, that’s not what happened. The coach immediately started focusing on the last week or two of trends, giving generic advice like the obvious fact I needed to be more active.

I prodded the coach to look back further, and it went back three years. When I pointed out I had data from 2011, the coach acknowledged and started spitting out random data points about daily step counts.

A few years ago, I was at my heaviest ever, followed by a steady decline to a weight slightly lower than where I’m at now. During that period, I tracked my glucose for several months with Dexcom's over-the-counter Stelo CGM.

I know there has to be actionable advice contained within my data, and that’s what I was hoping I’d get from the Health Coach.

To be fair, if I wrote a prompt asking for a specific fact or trend, the coach would crunch the data and give me an answer. But I don’t want to become a prompt engineer for my fitness app. I want it to analyze my data on a recurring basis and deliver actual insights.

I want to see stuff like: “Hey, I noticed that in 2023 between May and August, you worked out an average of X times per week, burned an average of Y calories, and you consistently lost Z pounds per week. Right now, you’re trending towards those numbers, but let’s come up with a plan to get you back on track with what you’ve proven works.”

Or: “In 2021, you didn’t record a single workout for X months, and you gained Y pounds per month, leading to your highest weight ever. What was going on in your life at this time so we can come up with a plan to avoid it?”

Instead, the Health Coach is hyper focused on today, maybe tomorrow, and sometimes yesterday. In many ways, it doesn’t feel any different than viewing my activity in any other fitness app that makes generic suggestions about what I should and shouldn’t be doing.

What sets Google’s Health Coach apart from most fitness apps is the ability to chat with it — you can talk about your latest workout or what you ate, and it’ll give you advice. At first, I used the chat feature a lot. But over time, I grew annoyed every time an alert popped up letting me know how I slept, telling me how my workout went, or summarizing my day’s activity (or lack thereof).

Each alert was worded almost exactly the same, reminding me of the same things, and always ended with some sort of question.

At about the two week mark our interactions began to feel forced.

It began to feel like another relationship I had to manage.

It began to feel like work.

By the three week mark, I rarely chatted with the coach. I’d quickly read its praise for a good workout or night sleep, or encouragement after a slacked off, and I almost never answered the question it always ended with.

I understand that AI chatbots are designed to keep engagement numbers high, and that’s why all of them are so positive and conversational, and Google’s Health Coach does just that.

I saw a thread or two on Reddit about giving the Coach a prompt to be mean when you don’t work out, or react a certain way when something else happens — but, again, that just feels like work. I shouldn’t have to mold the Coach into what it should have been out of the box.

Perhaps Google should create an onboarding workflow, asking users what kind of coach motivates them, what they don’t like, and how interactive the AI bot should be.

I didn’t import a decade's worth of health data because I wanted a digital cheerleader to ask me how I slept every morning or remind me to take it easy during my PT stretches.

I did it because I wanted a mirror held up to my habits, showing me what actually works for my body over time.

And right now, Google's Health Coach is too hyper-focused on the present to see the bigger picture. I'm going to keep wearing the Air for the hardware, but as for the Coach? We’re taking a break.