The Fitbit Air takes a smarter approach to the AI health dumpster fire

Google Health Coach seems to think I’m on the verge of physical collapse. My sleep is not where it needs to be, hence my unimpressive readiness score. My heart rate variability, a measure of how recovered I am, is below baseline. I’m spending too much time in a hot, humid environment, it says, reminding me temperatures are creeping above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. According to Google’s AI coach, I should skip my planned strength workouts. My number one job is to hydrate, stay out of the heat, and try to squeeze in some steps. Also — are my calves feeling any strain? How am I feeling about this assessment?

Mixed, honestly. As it turns out, that’s an accurate summation of how I’ve felt the past month testing the $99 Fitbit Air. If we were only talking about the hardware, I’d have a single complaint — my “lavender” device is actually periwinkle. (I have an unhinged Vergecast clip that proves I’m right, too.) But this isn’t a hardware story. It’s a story about software and how AI is taking over consumer healthcare.

As a basic tracker, the Air is exactly what Fitbit has historically done best. I rarely feel it on my wrist. It lasts a long time and charges quickly. While covering WWDC, I got a notification from the Air that I was down to 20 percent battery. I plopped it on the charger for the 45 minutes or so it took me to get ready, and I was back up to 85 percent. I haven’t had to think about it since. In the month or so since I booted up the Air, I’ve only charged it three times. I wish this didn’t require another proprietary charger, but this has always been an issue with fitness bands.

Are you going to get the most in-depth array of metrics ever? No, but it’s a comprehensive set that will serve all but the most quantified health nut. You get the basics like step count, resting heart rate, and sleep. You also get metrics like heart rate variability, blood oxygen, readiness, sleep stages, and cardio load — which is Fitbit’s way of contextualizing the optimal amount of cardiovascular activity a person should get in a week. There’s nothing by way of push notifications, but the device supports silent alarms that buzz you awake in the morning.

Compared to a Whoop band, the default textile strap is thinner, sleeker, and easier to put on. (The Whoop clasp has been annoying from day one; I’ve gotten used to it, but I still don’t like it.) The sensor is easy to pop in and out of straps if you feel like switching up the vibe. I don’t love the official alternative straps from Google, but hopefully we’ll see more third-party options given that Google shared the specs and guidelines. Even so, the biggest win stylistically for the Air is that it mostly just looks like a nice bracelet. A note for the petite-wristed: The Air fits wrists ranging from 130mm to 210mm, but I feel like my 5.75-inch (146mm) wrists are about as small as you can comfortably get before encountering sizing awkwardness like gaps and excess strap materials.

Like I said, I’ve got next to nothing to complain about as far as hardware. I could kvetch about the fact that there’s a $99 annual Google Health Premium subscription, but even then it’s completely optional. The subscription gets you a video workout library, adaptive fitness plans, some more in-depth metrics, and the AI health coach. But if all you want is basic fitness tracking data, none of that is paywalled anymore. But Google is betting you’ll want more insight than just the numbers. That’s where Google Health and its AI coach come in.

My general stance on consumer-focused AI health and fitness features, as I’ve written several times in Optimizer, is that they’re shitty, stapled-on cash grabs that do little more than regurgitate googleable facts. The promise might be personalized health insights based on your data, but that’s not the reality. That said, of all the ones I’ve tested, Google Health Coach is the closest to not sucking. So long as you’re willing to put a lot of effort in.

The Google Health Coach isn’t reinventing the AI fitness wheel. It’s a Gemini-powered chatbot that’s now front and center in the rebranded Google Health app. Every morning, it gives you a summary of your sleep and readiness metrics and then suggests what you ought to do for the day. It can answer questions you might have about your health, interpret what your data trends might suggest, and suggest tweaks to your overall fitness plans. For example, when I was about to go on a series of business trips while dealing with medication side effects, it was able to generate a travel-friendly workout routine with a less aggressive step goal and body weight movements for strength. That said, it’ll always defer to consulting healthcare professionals and won’t give any diagnoses.

The Health Coach isn’t exclusive to the Air. Pixel Watches get it too, and eventually, Google hopes to expand it to third-party wearables. Nearly 500,000 people have already beta-tested it since October 2025, and Google said it had over a million points of feedback before shipping out an improved version last month. I can attest that there have been notable upgrades. The layout is more customizable (though still cluttered), there are leaderboards so you can compete with friends, and the chatbot is about 30 percent less chatty. It provides sources for health facts — many of which, in my testing, were either clinical studies or reputable sources — and you can now upload medical records if you want to include more context for analysis. A note: Uploading records requires you to verify identification through CLEAR — yes, the same one for airport security lines. You also have to periodically renew permissions.

When you sync in the morning, the coach gives you a brief analysis of your readiness and sleep scores and then some advice about what you should do. For example, when I was recently dehydrated and tired while covering the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas, the coach told me to hydrate with electrolytes, skip my strength workouts, reduce my step count, and prioritize squeezing in restful moments. It told me the same thing a few days earlier when I was at Google I/O, and again when I was covering WWDC. It also told me to prioritize bland foods like bananas, rice, and applesauce to prevent gastrointestinal upset and nausea.

These were all good pieces of advice for my current health, but they came because I front-loaded the experience with five to six hours of telling the coach exactly what I needed, detailing what my three-, six-, nine-, and 12-month goals were, and painstakingly uploading and explaining about 10 years of medical context. I also enabled every single data integration you could imagine a wearable reviewer to have (aka a metric crapton). I told the coach all the medications I was on, the dosages, and my various diagnoses, and I manually typed out about three sets of recent blood test results when there were no medical records to upload (some health providers are not yet tech-savvy enough). Google Health Coach is sadly not able to read screenshots. Even after all that, the health coach reverted to older data during our next check-in and I had to remind it of our previous conversations.

This was beyond tedious, especially whenever the coach seemed to forget my context. There were other quirks, too. When I first set up the coach in October, I’d yet to start my current medication regimen. I had a 10,000 daily step goal, ran three to four times weekly, and lifted two to three times weekly. Since January, however, I’ve physically been unable to do more than walks and light strength training. Google Health Coach was great in the sense that it’s been able to craft fitness plans for me that prioritize muscle retention and set a more manageable step goal of 5,000 steps daily given how much fatigue my body is under. But while some parts of the app reflect that change, others still show my daily step goal as 10,000 steps. I can ask the AI to update that all I want — it never sticks.

I’m a highly self-quantified person on a specific treatment plan. I currently get blood tests quarterly, ultrasounds biannually, and follow-ups with doctors monthly. I’m a bit neurotic about this stuff because I’ve experienced enormous physiological change and side effects. What if you’re not? What if you have no incentive to spend several hours a week schooling, updating, and fact-checking the health coach? You’re going to get a dumber AI coach and a less useful experience.

Out of curiosity, I’ve polled several fellow tech journalists testing the Air and Google Health app. Unsurprisingly, their mileage varied. My colleague David Pierce had a useful experience. When violently ill, the AI coach correctly yelled at him to go to a hospital. Conversely, our senior news editor Richard Lawler hates the damn thing and wishes it’d buzz off forever. Another reviewer told me the coach was capital-B Bad, but that they only interacted with it about once a day and fed it no medical data. Yet another told me they had yet to receive any insight that was better than common sense. Others said the ability to log nutrition by taking a photo and then converse with the chatbot to edit any mistakes was immensely helpful. Overall, everyone’s quality of experience correlated with how much patience they had for interacting with AI.

To me, the best use case for the AI coach right now is as a tool between doctor visits. I input what my doctor says I need to focus on and let it try to hold me accountable for following that advice. That includes checking in daily to see if I’m prioritizing protein during meals while focusing on strength training and low-impact cardio. It helps me monitor progress and do light research for what might be causing side effect flare-ups. Before appointments, I can ask it to look back at my history and prepare follow-up questions for my doctor based on the past month.

The smart thing about the Fitbit Air is that you can have two totally different software experiences with the same hardware. If you hate AI and simply want an old-school fitness tracker, just pay the $99 for the hardware and make use of the free, basic data tracking. You never have to interact with the AI coach if you don’t want to. But if you do want to, you can. That experience also only costs $99 upfront since you get a three-month premium subscription trial.

Google Health is a work in progress. But the Air is the savviest wearable Google’s released since the Fitbit acquisition. There’s a palpable yearning for simpler trackers without having to give up some of the advances in health tech software. Add in the affordable price and the option to ignore the AI chatbot, and you have a gadget that can appeal to AI lovers and haters alike. And in health tech? That’s an increasingly hard balance to strike.