Google Fitbit Air Review: Barely There, Always Running

Setup begins with an onboarding chat with the new AI Health Coach, powered by Gemini. It asks about your goals, routines, and obstacles before generating a personalized wellness plan. Depending on how much detail you share, including the option to upload medical records, the process takes around five minutes. From there, the app generates a weekly plan with suggested workouts and targets that you can tweak manually or refine through follow-up chats with the Coach. The experience feels approachable rather than prescriptive or overly clinical.

I was surprised by how central the AI Health Coach becomes to the experience. More than the tracker itself, it was the Health Coach that kept pulling me back into the app throughout the day. It sends you check-ins in the morning with sleep recaps, post-workout summaries after exercises, and nightly overviews that connect your activity, recovery, and stress levels into something more coherent. Most of these messages also end with a question about how you’re feeling, which naturally opens into a chat rather than feeling like another notification to dismiss.

Automatic activity detection is solid overall. The Air consistently recognized walks and even generated useful summaries about intensity and recovery afterward. I haven’t run into any workout hallucinations (yet), though there were occasional misreads. On one day, for example, the Air logged a walk as a run but then immediately followed with a note pointing out that my heart rate data suggested it was probably a walk. It was an odd moment of the system partially correcting itself in real time.

The detection algorithms also noticeably improved with feedback. During my first three days of testing, the Air missed a recurring high-intensity workout class. But after I manually logged the sessions a few times, it began recognizing them automatically. Like the Oura Ring, the Air gets smarter the more context you give it.

If you start a workout from the app beforehand, you can follow live stats in real time, including heart rate, elapsed time, and the Cardio Load metric, which estimates the strain on your cardiovascular system during exercise. The AI Health Coach generates a weekly cardio target based on your health data. Like most readiness-style scores, I’d treat it more as guidance than fact; they’re ultimately based on Google’s proprietary algorithms.

Courtesy of Google