Google Working On New 'Coach' AI Fitness Assistant For Wear OS

Artificial intelligence has always been something that Google has been integrating into a lot of its products. Now, it looks like the company is planning to bring it to Wear OS smartwatches, but this time it will be an AI coach that will assist users with their health and fitness goals.

Google Coach is being developed by Google under the codename Project Wooden, according to Android Police. The new AI assistant will be able to provide users with health and fitness data proactively. Google Coach will also be ale to deliver suggestions and recommendations for workouts and track the user’s progress. The assistant is also said to be capable of providing alternative workouts if a user was unable to fulfill a scheduled routine. Google Coach can log the user’s activity and it will use that data to provide suggestions in the future.

The report goes on to say that Google Coach will also be able to help users monitor their nutrition and recommend meals. The assistant will base its recommendations on the user’s current location and habits. If users want to cook their own meals at home, Coach is capable of providing them with a weekly meal plan along with a shopping list that will be sent through email.

Since Google Coach will be another feature that will likely require sending smartwatch users notifications, Google is planning to streamline how notifications work. The company is planning to integrate “conversational notifications,” which will provide users with a single notification that may have more than one suggestion. This should help prevent having numerous notifications in a day and would still be in line with Google’s Digital Wellbeing feature on Android Pie.

Android Police says that Google Coach will primarily be rolled out to Wear OS smartwatches. However, some of Coach’s features will also be accessible from users’ smartphones. Google is also allegedly planning to bring the Coach AI assistant to Android TV, Google Home and other devices in the future. It’s likely that this is a way to make the feature more accessible by having it readily available on any Android device.

What’s odd with this report is that there was no mention of Google Fit, which is already capable of tracking health data on Wear OS. 9To5Google speculates that Google Coach might replace Google Fit. However, it’s also possible that the two features might simply end up co-existing on Wear OS smartwatches in the future.

There’s no word yet on which Wear OS smartwatches will get Google Coach first, but new smartwatches are expected to be released this fall. Qualcomm will be announcing its new Snapdragon Wear processor next month and the chipmaker did say that the new SoC would be accompanied by a new Wear OS “lead smartwatch.” It’s possible that this new smartwatch that Qualcomm was referring to could have Google Coach first.