Oura’s new AI coach wants to talk to you about your health data
In the future, you may not have to wonder why your Oura ring thinks you had a bad night’s sleep compared to the night before. The company is launching a new AI health coach that will allow you to ask questions about certain health metrics and measurements, further signaling that AI is playing a larger role in wearables.
The AI health coach is called Oura Advisor, and it’s launching as part of the company’s experimental Oura Labs program, which gives members early access to new features. Oura isn’t alone; the announcement comes as Google’s Fitbit and Samsung are working on their own AI-powered health assistants as part of an effort to make the wealth of data our wearables collect about us more palatable and actionable. That’s important, because that data isn’t very useful without some way to interpret it or translate those findings into lifestyle changes, a key area where wearables have historically fallen short.
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Oura is also introducing its new AI advisor a day before Samsung holds its Unpacked event in Paris, where the company is expected to reveal more details about its Galaxy Ring, a direct competitor to Oura.
Oura says you can chat with Oura’s coach to ask questions and get personalized recommendations based on your current habits. The feature is opt-in, and you can choose whether the assistant takes a supportive, mentoring, or goal-oriented tone when providing information. You can also set how often you want to receive notifications and your preferred time slot for notifications. The advisor is accessible via notifications and a card on the app’s Home tab, but you can start a direct chat by tapping the “+” button.
In an interview with CNET, Oura CEO Tom Hale gave a preview of how this digital coach will appear in the Oura app.
A screenshot showing what it’s like to interact with Oura Advisor.
Take Oura’s resilience metric, for example, which indicates how a person’s body balances physiological stress and recovery over a 14-day average. If your resilience rating indicates that you’re not recovering adequately, you might see a prompt asking if you’d like to chat about ways to improve your resilience. The same goes for sleep monitoring. If your Oura ring detects that you had a poor night’s sleep, you might see a prompt in the app asking you to ask why.
Oura Advisor is similar to Google’s Fitbit Labs program, which uses generative AI to answer questions about certain health metrics, such as why a user felt more tired on today’s run than yesterday. Google also announced in March that it was developing a large language model for personal health data based on its Gemini AI model. Oura uses a combination of different AI models to power Oura Advisor, and Hale says the company has worked with Claude, Mistral and OpenAI.
Samsung has also been working on a digital health coach that would use a large language model to interpret health data and provide more personalized insights into a user’s health metrics, CNET reported in June. The project appears to be in its early stages and would likely not be released this year even if it were to undergo further development, people familiar with the matter told CNET.
But Samsung is expected to discuss its Galaxy Ring and introduce new smartwatches at its Unpacked event on Wednesday. As Samsung emphasized the role AI will play in its wearables in a press release from Mayit seems likely that the company will further elaborate on new AI and health features during the event.
Hale believes Oura will differentiate itself from competitors like Fitbit and Samsung for a number of reasons, including the quality and consistency of its data, the ability of the Oura app to remember information about its users and communicate it transparently, and Oura’s use of multiple AI models.
You can share information with the Oura advisor, such as whether you are recovering from knee surgery. This information is stored as a ‘memory’. The advisor then takes this ‘memory’ into account when giving tips and advice.
“We want to be the innovators here, but we also want to create really, really valuable experiences,” Hale said. “We don’t just want to say, ‘Hey, we can do this, so we did it.'”
Together, the efforts by Oura Advisor, Fitbit Labs, and Samsung are just another sign of AI’s growing presence in the healthcare and consumer technology industries. International Data Corporation’s US Healthcare Provider IT Survey found that 39.4% of provider respondents ranked generative AI as one of the top three technologies set to impact healthcare over the next five years.
The growing presence of generative AI in health apps comes as tech giants like Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft push the technology into new corners of our daily lives, from editing photos to summarizing documents and writing emails. But creating an AI health assistant poses a more unique challenge because of its personal nature, Hale said.
“For coaching to be effective, it’s much more nuanced,” he said. “It’s a relationship. It’s about feeling that the coaching is good and you have to trust it.”
If companies like Oura, Google, and Samsung are proven right, AI could hold the key to helping us understand what makes a good night’s sleep and what makes a bad night’s sleep.
