Google’s AI Health Guidance Is What I’ve Been Looking for, but I Miss the Fitbit App

After spending all night working on a story about my hands-on time with Google’s upcoming smart glasses, I woke up weary from five hours of sleep. Google Health was sure to make me aware of that: “You’re getting high-quality sleep but not enough of it,” the app said when I opened it. I paid attention.

I was encouraged to drink water, take it easy and get to bed earlier. I appreciated the summary, and it felt a bit different from any other fitness tracker I’ve ever used before.

The new Fitbit Air is comfy and easy to forget about when it’s on your wrist, but the rebooted Google Health app it pairs with is the real change. Deep AI summaries of daily health progress — written up using generative AI — are the biggest focus. The subscription-based AI coaching feels like exactly the kind of feature I’d wanted on wearables for years. Now that it’s here, though, I wish it were layered onto the now-retired Fitbit app instead of existing as an entirely separate experience.

Gemini’s AI observations are helpful, but can be spammy

Text-based AI summaries of activity and sleep data are a clever idea, and being able to chat with the AI about trends in my history feels genuinely novel. But I don’t find myself wanting to chat with it; I just like to glance at the observations and act accordingly. 

I told Google Health I’d done some weight training one day, and it logged the activity based on my description. Beyond that, though, I wasn’t especially interested in telling it how I felt or what my plans were. Mentioning that workout just once also led Google Health to repeatedly remind me about those same weights each day, instead of suggesting other activities I might want to try.

Text, however, can feel messy. Plus, I like charts and clear stat layouts. The Fitbit app always excelled at that, and while Google Health still offers some of those stats on tap, the instant-glance dashboard is largely gone. 

Gemini mostly managed my exhaustion

After a week of terrible sleep habits — a dizzying stretch at Google I/O followed by a weekend at my Princeton collegereunion, where I didn’t get to bed until around 3 a.m. each night — Google Health genuinely helped me understand how badly I needed recovery. It also highlighted which of those short nights of sleep seemed to be the most restorative.

I appreciated its advice on resting, recovering and generally taking better care of myself. Once the reunion was over, I went to bed much earlier and got sleep that Google Health considered beneficial. It also noted that I woke up late during a deep sleep stage, which can leave you feeling groggy — and, to be fair, I was groggy for most of Sunday.

But Google Health also interpreted my 19-minute walk at 1:44 a.m. late Saturday — or technically very early Sunday — as a “solid way to bridge into Sunday.” In reality, it was just more walking on a 17,000-plus-step day when I was exhausted and trying to find an Uber home, which didn’t feel like much of a healthy transition at all.

The new app feels unfinished

I like the AI summaries, but I’d much rather see them tucked into a sidebar or separate panel while the standard Fitbit summaries remain front and center. Then again, if that happened, Google probably wouldn’t be able to put its AI health coach in your face as aggressively as it does now — and that’s exactly what I don’t like. I don’t want my health journey to feel like a feed. I want it to feel like a dashboard.

Yes, Google’s Health app does have Sleep and Health stat dashboards that can be brought up at a tap, but neither feel as comprehensive and distilled as what Fitbit offered before at a glance. And without a screen on the Fitbit Air, I need those stat readouts on the phone more than ever.

I think this is an evolutionary step. Maybe other wearables (including, perhaps, smart glasses) serve up screens on demand that deliver the readouts I want. But instead, what if Google’s Gemini layer were summoned when needed? As Apple readies its next version of WatchOS and as wearables such as the Oura ring keep advancing in features, AI-infused summaries and coaching are inevitably going to be the future of health tech. 

But I don’t trust AI enough to deeply chat with it, and text summaries and advice can become exhausting. What about infusing these observations into useful infographics? Or just bring back that Fitbit app and add Gemini in? 

There’s still time to consider this, Google. Everything doesn’t have to be an AI feed, even though Google I/O made it clear that’s the direction Google wants to push.