Garmin’s Paid AI Doesn’t Seem to Do Much
Last week, Garmin unveiled a subscription tier for its AI-powered app that promises to provide insights into your workouts. I liked the company’s policies on training and privacy, but I had yet to see real AI results when I wrote about it. I spent a week with this feature, which Garmin says is still in beta. Here are my impressions.
AI insights are just one of the features coming with Garmin’s new $6.99-per-month Connect+ subscription. Some other additions look much more useful, such as the Live Activities feature. I have a full rundown of what you’ll get if you pay for the upgrade. Your subscription only applies to new features, not existing app features or specific features included with the watch you purchase.
AI information is only displayed in one limited part of the application.
I poked around all over the Garmin Connect app and could only find information about AI in one place. This will be the main screen where right at the top, above my usual training and health scorecards, there will be a small paragraph called “active intelligence.”
If you don’t check the Garmin Connect app often, you’ll miss out on a lot of information. They don’t appear on your watch or in notifications on your phone. There’s no chat interface like Whoop or Oura where you can ask questions about your data.
I expected the AI to be more like Strava, where every action you take a little description/motivational message appears. However, Strava’s AI is notorious for recalculating run description data with errors added, so it might be best not to try to imitate this.
AI “understanding” is not very insightful
My first few ideas were pretty simple—just comparing my intensity minutes to a goal I didn’t even know I had—but I decided that more interesting analysis was yet to come.
However, a week later I still haven’t seen him. The most exciting moment was when I caught the AI making a blunder in math. “Today you logged two activities: running and indoor cycling for a total duration of one hour and twenty-seven minutes,” the message reads. My actions were noted in the usual place, just below this “insight”, and the mileage was 40:10, and the bike ride was a quick test of this gadget that took less than three minutes. It’s 43 minutes, stupid robot. (I’m not the only one who has encountered bad math: two scuba divers posted on Reddit that the AI told them they had been underwater for over a month in one day.)
In my case, the AI’s obsession with minutes of intensity may be to blame. I can’t do the math for this example, but in some other cases the AI seemed to total intensity minutes and didn’t always include the word “intensity.” (One minute of vigorous exercise counts as two “minutes of intensity”, an idea taken from public health guidelines .)
Otherwise, the messages were simply summaries of data that could already be viewed elsewhere in the application. I did my best to capture every piece of information I saw and here is the list of topics:
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5 posts about intensity minutes and comparing them to my goal or weekly or daily average.
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3 Posts About My Stress Level or “Sleep Stress” – A Metric I’ve Never Heard of and Still Can’t Understand What It Means
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2 messages about my body battery (a number that increases during sleep and decreases during exercise or stress)
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2 messages about steps
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2 running posts (with my mileage, pace and/or time)
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2 cycling activity posts (with my time, heart rate, cadence and/or power)
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1 message stating that my training status is in “recovery”
After one or two sentences with the indicators he described, there was a sentence generally encouraging me to continue the good work. I could give feedback on whether the idea was interesting or not, but there was no opportunity to ask questions or get more information. I still don’t know what “sleep stress” is or how to get a quick overview of intensity minutes if I actually want to track them.
Doesn’t seem like anyone likes the AI feature
I’ve always been excited about the hype around artificial intelligence, so I checked the Reddit and Garmin forums to see if anyone liked it more than I did. I couldn’t find anyone who admitted to liking Active Intelligence or getting any useful information from it.
“There’s a lot you can do with AI and training software, but all Garmin does is use AI to simply rehash existing data,” said a Garmin forum user. “It looks like Active Intelligence is basically just a very basic overview of your workouts,” one Reddit user said, adding, “I was really hoping it would be a real chatbot that you could talk to about workouts etc to create plans.”
Other Reddit users wondered why the AI wasn’t creating and adjusting workout plans, perhaps even analyzing user data to determine which workouts correlated with improved fitness. Garmin hasn’t publicly said what its future plans are for AI, only that the feature is currently in beta testing.
“I’ve been receiving messages from AI throughout the day and I can say that they do not provide any practical or informational benefit to me,” said one Reddit user. I’m afraid I’ll have to agree.