Aura's new AI coach wants to talk about your health data.

In the future, you won't have to wonder why your aura thinks you had a worse night's sleep than the previous evening. The company is launching a new AI health coach that will make it possible to ask questions about specific health metrics and readings, adding that AI is playing a bigger role in wearable devices.

The AI ​​health coach is called Aura Advisor and is launching as part of the company's experimental Aura Labs program, which lets members try out new features early. Ora is not alone. The announcement comes as Google's Fitbit and Samsung are working on their own AI-powered health assistants to make the wealth of data more useful and actionable. This is important because data isn't very useful without the ability to interpret it or translate those results into lifestyle changes, an important area where wearables have been lacking in the past.

Read more: Why Aura's CEO Isn't Worried About Samsung's Galaxy Ring

Aura is also introducing its new AI advisor just a day before Samsung holds its Unpacked event in Paris, where it is expected to reveal more details about its Galaxy Ring. Which is a direct competitor of Aura.

Aura says you'll be able to chat with an Aura coach to ask questions and get personalized recommendations based on your current habits. The feature will be opt-in, and you'll be able to choose whether the assistant takes a supportive, guided or goal-oriented tone when providing information. You will also be able to set how often you want to receive notifications and your preferred time of day for alerts. The advisor will be accessible via a card on the Notifications and Home tab of the app, but you can start a live chat by pressing the “+” button.

In an interview with CNET, Aura CEO Tom Hale provided an example of how this digital coach would look in the Aura app.

Take Aura's resilience metric, for example, which indicates how a person's body is balancing physical stress and recovery based on a 14-day average. If your flexibility rating indicates that you are not recovering well enough, you may see a prompt asking if you would like to discuss ways to improve your flexibility. . Such is the case when it comes to sleep monitoring. If your Aura ring detects that you had a bad night's sleep, you may see a prompt in the app that allows you to ask why.

Oura Advisor is similar to Google's Fitbit Labs program, which will use generative AI to answer questions about specific health metrics, such as why a user felt more tired during a run today than yesterday. be Google also announced in March that it was developing a major language model for personal health data based on its Gemini AI model. Aura is using a combination of different AI models to power the advisor, and Hale says the company has worked with Cloud, Mistral and OpenAI.

CNET reported in June that Samsung has also worked on a digital health coach that uses language to interpret health data and provide more personalized insights into a user's health metrics. Will use a larger model. The project appears to be in its early stages and likely won't be released this year even if it continues to be developed, people familiar with the matter told CNET.

But Samsung is expected to discuss its Galaxy Ring and introduce new smartwatches during its Unpacked event on Wednesday. Since Samsung emphasized the role that AI will play in its wearable devices in a press release from May, it looks like the company will talk more about new AI and health features during the event.

Hale believes that Ora's offering will stand out from competitors like Fitbit and Samsung for several reasons, such as the quality and consistency of its data, the transparent way the Oura app remembers information about its users. Ability to interact with and Aura's use of multiple AI models.

You can share information with Aura Advisor, such as whether you are recovering from knee surgery, which will be saved as a “memory”. The consultant will then take this “memory” into account when giving suggestions and advice.

“We want to be innovators here, but we also want to create really, really valuable experiences,” Hale said. “We don't want to be just like, 'Hey, we can do it, so we did it'.”

Aura Advisor, Fitbit Labs and Samsung's efforts together are another sign of AI's growing presence in the healthcare and consumer tech industries. International Data Corporation's US Healthcare Provider IT Survey found that 39.4 percent of provider respondents named generative AI as one of the top three technologies that will impact healthcare over the next five years.

The growing presence of generative AI in health apps comes as tech giants Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft are pushing the technology into new areas of our daily lives, from editing photos to summarizing documents. To do and write emails. But according to Hale, creating an AI health assistant presents a more unique challenge because of its personalized nature.

“For coaching to be effective, it's very important,” he said. “It's a relationship. It's about a feeling that the coaching is good, and you have to trust it.”

If companies like Aura, Google and Samsung are right, AI could be the key to helping us better understand a bad night's sleep versus a good night's sleep.