Whoop has launched an AI coach, based on ChatGPT, to help users get more from their Whoop tracker.
The chatbot, which is powered by Open AI's GPT-4, can analyze your data and offer specific analysis and recommendations – as well as general advice about your health, sleep, and workouts. We spoke to Whoop VP of Performance Kristen Holmes about this very idea back in March, and now it's a reality.
Wareable has had access to the feature for a couple of weeks, and it certainly adds a whole new aspect to Whoop – and it’s something we can see slowly getting under the skin of users.
“I believe fundamentally that every human being is going to need a 24/7 health and fitness coach in their life,” Whoop CEO Will Ahmed told Wareable in an interview.
So that’s the vision – but how does it work?
Using the Whoop AI Coach
Wareable
Right now, the Whoop AI Coach is a text input box on the main Whoop screen. Tapping this opens up a full Chat GPT-style box, with some quick ideas for questions, or you can go right ahead and ask questions.
You can ask for data such as summaries on your recent sleep strain or recovery performance, and the Whoop Coach will crunch the numbers. You can also ask follow-up questions, and of course, ask for advice on achieving your goals.
We found questions on the type of workout needed to achieve strain goals generally very effective. It's still in beta, so there's the odd quirk, but generally, it's slid. You can also ask more general queries, such as what you should drink and eat to prepare for a run or gym session at a specific time. So it's very much like having a coach in your pocket wherever you go.
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I also asked Whoop Coach if I should run because I felt a cough coming on. Its answer was interesting because while it didn't commit to whether I should run or not, it based its answer on my data, and last night’s Health Monitor data, and pulled out our established baselines.
It's also very good at linking you straight to the best screen of the Whoop app. While the data is insightful, ultimately it's a chatbot, and text answers aren't visually compelling. If there's a relevant graph, the Whoop Coach is good at helping you access it.
The Whoop platform is an extremely detailed health monitor with tons of data points, so it’s particularly well suited to this kind of AI querying.
Privacy and pricing
“We've had this unbelievable hardware and super accurate health data to interact with. And the piece I've always been asking myself is, how do we elevate the coaching? How do we enable individuals to quickly get the answer they want?" said Ahmed.
So why choose OpenAI and Chat GPT? Will Ahmed told Wareable that it looked at several LLMs on the market, but found the quality of GPT-4’s analysis superior. He also revealed that OpenAI had collaborated on the launch, particularly around “zero retention” which means that user health data isn’t shared with OpenAI and the AI can’t learn from it:
“OpenAI was an active partner in the experience. And as a consequence, we've been able to build an infrastructure with them where none of our user data can train their models, which is called ‘zero retention,'" he continued.
“So none of the data that's passed through or back from open AI stays on their side. That's not a general policy of large language models, but it was really important to us.”
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Anyone who’s dabbled with AI will know that it’s an expensive business. But Ahmed says that Whoop won’t charge extra for the service (as we’ve seen with the vastly inferior Amazfit Coach), and it will be available for all users.
“It is a costly service. There's no question. But we intend to release this to members right now as part of their membership without an additional cost to them. And a lot of this comes back to our philosophy on being a subscription business, we think that it's our responsibility to be continually innovating and elevating the Whoop experience."
Wareable says
The Whoop Coach is certainly still a beta offering right now, but it’s really fun to play around with, and if you use Whoop daily like I do, you’ll certainly find an extra spin on your data that’s interesting. Yes, it's more of a curiosity for now, but we're keen to see if it can find a place in our daily lives.
Asking general health questions is also valuable, and we found getting details on when and what to eat to fuel our workouts genuinely helpful.
Ultimately, it does still feel a little tacked onto the app right now. Will Ahmed told me that in the future, Whoop Coach will evolve to be proactive, rather than reactive. It will be able to present the data you (and specifically you) want to see, when you want to see it.
Gone will be the days of mindless annoying prompts from your wearables, and instead, you’ll get the perfect information, served up when you need to see it.
It's a dawning of an era of truly smart wearables – and ironically it's one with no screen that's leading the way.
How we test
James is the co-founder of Wareable, and he has been a technology journalist for 15 years.
He started his career at Future Publishing, James became the features editor of T3 Magazine and T3.com and was a regular contributor to TechRadar – before leaving Future Publishing to found Wareable in 2014.
James has been at the helm of Wareable since 2014 and has become one of the leading experts in wearable technologies globally. He has reviewed, tested, and covered pretty much every wearable on the market, and is passionate about the evolving industry, and wearables helping people achieve healthier and happier lives.