Google is working on a personal fitness and health assistant called Google Coach that recommends workouts and meal plans, according to a leaked report. Google Coach will do more than just track your exercise, says Android Police, it’ll also use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the data it gathers on you to suggest ways to lead a healthy lifestyle.
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According to the report, Google Coach may recommend workout routines, track exercise progress and recommend alternatives if you miss a planned workout. For example, Google Coach will be able to take your previous fitness data and recommend alternative ideas when you’ve missed a workout or track your progress over time for feedback on how to improve.
The new personal assistant is allegedly being developed for wearable devices running Wear OS.
The wellness assistant will also keep track of your nutrition and the foods you eat, and use other signals (like location) to make actionable recommendations, reports Venture Beat. For example, if you’re at a restaurant and Google knows your meal habits, it may point you toward healthier items offered by the restaurant so you won’t even need to look at the menu. This could be particularly useful for people with more specialist dietary requirements. Or, before you go grocery shopping, the Google Coach could email you a weekly meal plan personalized to your schedule.
Suggestions by Google Coach will come in the form of notifications and messages, mostly, but since the AI assistant is going to monitor so many aspects of your wellbeing, Google is aware of a potential for notification overload. The search engine giant hopes to address this by building conversational notifications. Rather than individual alerts telling you to get your daily steps, take medication, and drink more water, you might get a single notification that incorporates all three suggestions.
Google will reportedly launch its AI-powered on smartwatches first. A Wear OS device will be required for live activity tracking, and it’ll eventually come to smartphones, set-top boxes, smart speakers, and other devices “in some capacity.”
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The concept isn’t new, startups like Noom use AI to assess diet, weight, and exercise and suggest recipes and workouts. And, New York-based Vi sells earbuds with a conversational running coach who provides feedback in real time, according to Venture Beat.
But if Google Coach ever hits the market, it’ll be the company’s most ambitious attempt yet to merge AI with the treasure trove of fitness data wearable devices collect. Google Fit, which the company launched in 2014, is less a fitness assistant; it works as an aggregator, which unifies sensor and activity data from third-party apps and software in a single dashboard.
