Oura AI Advisor Is Out of Beta, but Is It Worth Using?
Oura Advisor, an artificial intelligence feature previously hidden in Oura’s beta program, is now rolling out to all Oura Ring customers. It takes the form of a chatbot that you can start a conversation with at any time from the Oura app, plus the advisor promises to “check in” with you daily, weekly, or three times a week, depending on what you request. But do you really want him to do any of these things?
What does Oura Advisor do?
To be fair, it looks like pretty standard fitness app AI, meaning all it really does is recalculate the app’s metrics in a more conversational tone. The advisor itself told me that it “analyzes your Oura data to provide insights and recommendations tailored to your health goals.” Its language is in the same style as the little encouraging sentences you see on Oura’s home screen, and it tends to repeat the same advice.
When you open a chat with the Advisor, he asks what you want to talk about. So far I haven’t been able to get anything out of it that isn’t obvious in other screens of the app. When I asked why my resting heart rate was high lately, I was given a general list of reasons why resting heart rate could be high in anyone. When I asked him to provide “information” (since he told me that his job is to provide information), he told me my cardiovascular age, which is a metric that also appears on the main screen of my app.
How to enable Oura Advisor
Until recently, you had to subscribe to Oura Labs (beta testing program) to access the advisor. It’s still rolling out to all users, so if you want to try it out, you can enable any Oura Labs features you like by going to the menu in the top left corner, selecting Oura Labs, and choosing which “experiments” you want to enable. (Currently there is a food tracking feature and a “heart check”.)
You’ll need to use the app in English, although Oura says they plan to offer the advisor in other languages in the future. Once the advisor is enabled, you can click the “+” in the bottom right corner (the same place where you add an action or start a meditation session) and select “Advisor”. The chat will open and on this screen you can also configure the advisor settings.
How to change settings and delete “memories” in Oura Advisor
In chat, you can tap the settings icon in the top right corner of the screen. Available settings:
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Style : conversational, colloquial or direct. I can’t tell if the two “conversational” options are different, or if the duplication is a mistake on Oura’s part.
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Arrival notifications : daily, three times a week or weekly; you can also specify what time of day you prefer: morning, afternoon or evening (or any combination)
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Memories : The Advisor remembers everything you told him about yourself. In the “My Memories” section there is “User participates in weightlifting competition” and “User got sick”, both of which I said directly in our conversations. You can delete a memory by tapping the trash can icon next to it.
There is also a “reset” button for the advisor, which means all settings, conversations and memories will be deleted.
To check what he was getting from his memories, I asked the advisor if his data indicated that I was sick. Having the “memory” of my illness, he said yes and suggested that I focus on getting better today. After deleting this memory, I asked the same question again. It said that my resting heart rate indicated that I was under stress and that perhaps I should focus on recovery today.
Is Oura Advisor worth using?
So far, I haven’t seen the Advisor hallucinate data or say anything inappropriate, but he also hasn’t told me anything that I would consider an “epiphany.” I tried asking him about data that I couldn’t easily read from the app—like my long-term sustainability trends—and he said he didn’t have that data. On the Oura subreddit, most posts about the advisor seem to be complaining about how it doesn’t do anything interesting, but one user said they were able to get the advisor to talk to them about food choices logged using the Meals feature, which is still in beta.
One user said the advisor helped them improve their resilience score, but they didn’t provide much information about how they did it, other than to provide the advisor with specific information about things like sleep schedules. Now that this feature is available to more users, perhaps we’ll see if more people find it useful.