I Tried Google’s New AI Health Coach, and It Totally Confused Me

Posted on October 28, 2025 by resourcefulman

Google has launched its “Personal Health Agent,” an AI coach available in the Fitbit app. It’s currently in preview and only available to Android users in the US with a Fitbit Premium subscription. I’m one of them, so I tried it out, and it provided me with some decent workouts. The app also informed me that the Pixel Watch 4 , which Google makes and which I reviewed and am currently wearing, doesn’t exist. So, all’s well with the AI.

How to enable a personal health coach in the Fitbit app

This new coaching bot is available in public preview today for Fitbit Premium users in the US, provided they’re using Android. (iOS support is coming soon, according to Google.) I’m a little confused about what to call this bot—Google’s email calls it a “Personal Health Agent” and describes it as a “Google Health AI coach.” Google’s blog post calls it a “Personal Health Coach” from Fitbit. Either way, it’s located in the Fitbit app.

When the AI coach became available, a message appeared at the top of the Today screen asking if I wanted to “try new Fitbit features before they’re available to everyone.” If you missed this message, go to your profile photo in the upper-right corner of the app and select “Public Viewing” from the menu that appears.

Setting my fitness goals

Google claims its new chatbot can answer general health questions… but it can also do web searches, so I wasn’t thrilled. I wanted to see how well the bot could create a consistent workout plan for me—a key feature Google touts. At first, it worked pretty well.

The trainer asked the same questions I’d expect a personal trainer to ask when developing a plan. The approach was well-structured, and I gathered the following information:

My main goal (I said I want to get back into a regular habit after a break)
My biggest problem (I said something about motivation and time)
How much exercise I used to do , including mileage and running pace (this was taken from my training data, but let me make corrections)
What I like to do
When I like to do them (I’ve noticed that my strength training tends to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays)
What equipment do I have (I concluded that I have an outdoor running area and strength training equipment)
How many days a week would I like to exercise?

He responded well to my suggestions during our conversation. I said I wanted to alternate between strength training and running (with Saturdays off), starting today with strength training. He suggested focusing on lower body exercises to support my running, which I declined. I named a few of my favorite exercises and asked if we could build a strength program around them. We agreed: a six-day plan featuring strength training and running was ready in the very near future.

The bot said creating a plan would take up to 10 minutes, but it actually only took about two. My workouts for the week were consistent with what we discussed, with a few differences. For example, I asked for pull-ups, and it suggested assisted pull-ups. I also didn’t like the six-rep sets on the squats and bench press, as I was hoping for heavier exercises with fewer reps. But there’s a “change plan” button, and with a little fiddling, I was able to customize the workouts to my liking.

He has problems with long-term planning.

I was eager to look at my plan—for me, a plan is a sequence of steps toward achieving a goal. In the case of a training plan, this means gradually increasing mileage over several weeks or months. For example, a marathon training plan involves gradually increasing mileage until you can confidently run 26 miles. In my case, if my goal is consistency, almost anything will do. This is a simple regimen for a coach, AI, or any other program.

But what I saw in the app wasn’t what I’d call a plan . It was four workouts running from today until Saturday’s rest day. There was no way to see the next week or the week after that, or even know how many weeks were in this supposed plan. I couldn’t even see the last two days of my six-day plan.

I asked the bot what would happen next, and it said it couldn’t tell me anything about next week. What about the rest of this week? (We agreed on six days, after all.) It told me the week ran from Tuesday to Saturday. I started to feel like those bodybuilders arguing about how many days there are in a week . After some back-and-forth, it gave me text descriptions of workouts for Sunday and Monday, but they were incomplete, not even specifying which exercises I’d do on strength day. When I exited the conversation and looked at the workouts in the app, I only had the original four.

I tried asking a different question, and the trainer was able to give a general overview of what might happen in the next few weeks. Unfortunately, the changes we’d discussed earlier weren’t taken into account, so the second week was described as being based on the originally planned first week, not the workouts I had on my calendar. If I’d compared this chatbot’s plan to something from, say, a Reddit fitness wiki , almost everything written there would have been more comprehensive.

There is no good way to track your workouts.

I’ve already written about the basic fitness tracking features on the Pixel Watch. (This also applies to Fitbit devices like the Charge 6. ) You can enable strength training on the watch, but you can’t track rest time or record completed exercises, although you can create and track running workouts.

Given this, I didn’t expect to be able to track strength training on the watch, but I decided to ask. The bot told me to simply track a basic strength training session on the watch (which records heart rate and total time, nothing more), and then track the exercises on my phone. Quite reasonable.

But wait! The app simply shows each exercise with a checkbox next to it. If you need to do three sets of six reps, you’ll only see one checkbox, not three. And there’s no way to mark the weight you used so you can increase it next time. The bot told me we’ll be doing progressive overload , but how can we progress if we don’t track the weight used?

Okay, so power tracking might be difficult for a simple bot, but running workouts should be easy, right? The old version of the Fitbit app (which you can still access if you leave the preview) could recommend personalized running workouts and download them to your watch, allowing it to suggest different paces and intervals. I tried one of these when reviewing the Pixel Watch 4 , so I know the device can do it. I was hoping for a similar result here.

But when I asked the bot how to track my running workouts, things went wrong. It gave me step-by-step instructions for finding workouts on my Pixel watch, but those instructions were incorrect. For example, it told me to swipe up to open the app drawer, which isn’t the case. It also told me my workout should appear on a specific screen, but there were no workouts on that screen.

I let the bot guide me through the troubleshooting process, but it all fell apart when I told it I had a Pixel Watch 4. It said there was no such watch. There were only Pixel Watch 1 and Pixel Watch 2.

What? The Pixel Watch 3 came out over a year ago. I’m currently wearing a Pixel Watch 4. I’m actually wearing one of those. I asked the bot where it gets its information about Pixel Watch models, and it admitted to hallucinating about “non-existent Pixel Watch 4s.” Hmm.

Bottom line: A promising technology if it ever works.

As with many AI products these days, the best I can say is that it would be a cool feature if it worked well, but it doesn’t right now.

Here are a few things it’s doing well so far: The introductory dialogue is well-structured and gathers the necessary information (at least in my rather simple situation). The bot understood what I meant when I used phrases like “hard singles with short breaks.” It was able to extract data from my training history, such as distance covered and the types of equipment I’m likely to have access to.

But he can’t do a lot, including the most basic, fundamental things. He can’t plan long-term, which is the whole point of a plan. He also can’t give me the opportunity to follow the workouts he suggests.

This brings me back to the question of why anyone would need this AI coach at all. Sure, it can come up with a workout idea , but anyone who’s ever typed a query into a search engine can do that. Finding simple workout ideas online is like searching for grains of sand on a beach. Adding another one isn’t innovation.

But if the AI could translate the workout it generated into a format I could use with Google technology (whether the app or the watch), that feature would be useful and wouldn’t duplicate what I find in a million other places. The ability to track your progress over time would also be helpful, but that would mean the app would have to log your weights so it could actually program progressive overload, not just talk about it. That’s exactly what a personal fitness trainer really needs, and this chatbot isn’t designed for that right now.

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