Fitbit’s health chatbot will arrive later this year

Like most other corners of the tech world, Google sees AI driving the next innovations in healthcare technology. Company yearbook The Check Up event expanded its plans to add a personal health chatbot to the Fitbit app, expand Google Lens to better search for skin conditions, and use a version of its Gemini chatbot in the medical field.

One of Google’s most intriguing announcements on Tuesday was more details on an experimental AI feature for Fitbit users, briefly teased last year. Fitbit Labs will allow owners to make correlations and “connect the dots” from the health data tracked using their wearable devices. A chatbot in the mobile app will let you ask natural language questions and create custom charts to learn about your health.

The company hasn’t gone into great depth about the Fitbit chatbot yet, but an example it posted Tuesday shows a user asking about potential links between activity and sleep. Fitbit Assistant responded that a user’s days with higher activity scores correlate with better sleep (while cautioning against assuming that’s the only reason).

Fitbit’s generative AI tool will arrive later this year. Google says it will (at least initially) only be available to Fitbit Premium subscribers with Android devices enrolled in the Fitbit Labs program.

The company sees Google Lens as filling some gaps in healthcare where text searches fall short. It says a feature (introduced last year) that uses Lens to identify “visually similar matches from the network” for skin conditions is now available in over 150 countries. It can work even when you don’t know where to start when describing a dermatological condition.

In a similar light, Google has added new images and diagrams to its web results from reputable online sources to help you understand conditions like neck pain. Next: The company is seeing the visual results that are driving its pursuits for more health conditions, including migraines, kidney stones and pneumonia. Updates to the visual search engine are expected to roll out over the next few months.

The company too mentioned that Fitbit and Google Research are partnering with health and wellness experts and other medical professionals to create a new AI model for health and wellness. The long-term goal is for the Gemini-powered Large Language Model (LLM) to power its future AI features across Google’s various health offerings.