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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Fitbit Premium’s public preview is available October 28.
- Adult Android users can try it out in the US.
- The AI coach can address sleep, activity, and wellness concerns.
Fitbit is getting an AI-powered facelift, but before its widespread rollout, the company is letting eligible users test the redesigned Fitbit Premium.
The new Fitbit Premium emphasizes an individualized and personalized fitness and wellness coach experience. Powered by Gemini, Fitbit Premium tailors exercise, sleep recommendations, diet, and more to the individual user.
The coach anchors its recommendations in the information a Fitbit user provides through the initial survey. The Fitbit team encourages people to provide as much detail as possible about their routine, schedule, exercise preferences, and more during this intake to get uber-personalized recommendations.
In a demo, the Fitbit team showed the app providing recommendations for a user who loves to ski and trail run and leads an active lifestyle, but with a busy work schedule. The app then generates exercises for building strength and endurance for these activities.
The coach can also build customized exercise routines and ping the user on the days when they plan to work out. Additionally, users can discuss their plan with the coach to update on progress and make adjustments long-term. Let’s say a Fitbit Premium user wants a new health challenge: The user can prompt the coach to create one. The coach can also design a workout under a user’s aforementioned constraints, like a 20-minute upper body workout using dumbbells or interval training for a user’s first marathon.
Fitbit Premium’s coach doesn’t just offer exercise advice. It can also integrate various aspects of a user’s health, like sleep and overall health, and illustrate the connections between the two. Users can prompt the coach to look for patterns in their sleep, or make connections between a biomarker, like heart rate variability, and their activity load. They can also ask about health conditions or symptoms.
Several features — such as menstrual health logging, advanced running metrics, and sharing features like messages and badges — won’t be available in public preview.
Fitbit says the information it provides on the app is secure and grounded in science. It plans to eventually include citations for its responses, though users won’t see the coach citing its sources in conversations in the preview.
Reddit users under the r/fitbit subreddit say that paying for Fitbit Premium isn’t worth it. Fitbit devices come with six months of Fitbit Premium free, and users say that’s the only time they’ve used it. Three separate Reddit threads on the topic result in users firmly agreeing that the paid tier is no different than the standard tier.
The AI-powered redesign and its new role as a sleep, wellness, and fitness coach could bring more value to the Premium tier and get more Fitbit members to pay the $10 monthly subscription fee (or $80 annually).
Adult Fitbit Premium users in the US with a qualifying Fitbit or Google Pixel Watch can try out the redesigned app starting October 28. Android users get the preview first, and Fitbit is expanding access to iOS users soon. Users can switch back from the public preview to an older version of the app if they so choose.
“This is a brand new experience, so initially, there will be some gaps, but you’ll see regular improvements and communication from us when we add, change, or improve features and capabilities,” Fitbit’s team writes in a blog post.
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