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9to5Google Log Out: What happened to Google Coach?

Abner Li | Apr 18 2023 - 12:05 pm PT

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In August 2018, a report detailed “Google Coach” as a “wearable health and fitness assistant” that would proactively suggest and track workouts, with performance used to inform future recommendations.

Outside of exercise, there was a nutrition component with recommended meals “based on your location and patterns” as well as home meal planning, complete with suggested shopping lists.

Google Coach was said to have “conversational notifications” that bundled information into a single alert. “Live tracking” was said to require a Wear OS watch, with plans to expand to Android TV and Google Home.

The leak did not have a launch date, only adding that “Project Wooden” was the internal name.

Nearly five years later, no such product has launched. A week after the rumor, Google instead announced a redesign of Fit with a focus on Move Minutes and Heart Points.

In the intervening years, Google Fit added sleep logging and, in 2020, dropped Move Minutes for more familiar step tracking. Other notable additions included camera-based heart and respiratory rate measurements and Sleep Sensing integration with the 2nd-gen Nest Hub. In short, nothing approaching the capabilities of Google Coach ever emerged.

The ideal of building an all-encompassing health assistant very much fit where Google’s priorities were in 2018. There was, of course, Google Assistant adding features left, right, and center. Meanwhile, bolstering the wearable-heavy nature of Coach was that Wear OS was seeing a lot of development. A redesign coming that August added one swipe access to Fit and a Google Now-esque Assistant feed.

The original article framed Google as having “a lot of ideas in the pipeline for how this service will work,” and, reassessing this rumor four years and eight months later, it’s more likely that an internal concept was what leaked out.

Google Coach today?

Any such capabilities launching today would undoubtedly have to be part of Fitbit and come with Pixel Watch exclusivity. Some aspect of Google Coach’s Android TV integration is likely happening with Google TV as the ability to see “interactive video workouts” emerged in a more definite roadmap leak. (You’ll be able to see real-time data, like heart rate, from a Fitbit or Wear OS device.)

Meanwhile, Bard is already able to recommend meals, while LLMs make possible more natural, conversational interactions. Last November, Google started letting you search for restaurants by dish, a capability the company definitely did not have in 2018, further suggesting that Coach was an aspirational concept back then.

In March, Sundar Pichai said Google now has the AI technology to build your own personal assistant. A modern Google Coach seems right up there.