Insiders say Apple is building an “AI health coach”
Apple is developing an AI health coach to help you live healthier, people with knowledge of the project told Bloomberg. If the app comes to fruition, it could put Apple a step closer to its goal of empowering people to take control of their health with tech.
“Our vision for the future is to continue to create science-based technology that equips people with even more information and acts as an intelligent guardian for their health, so they’re no longer passengers on their own health journey,” Jeff Williams, Apple’s COO, said in July 2022. “Instead, we want people to be firmly in the driver’s seat with meaningful, actionable insights.”
The AI health coach will reportedly provide personalized suggestions and “motivation” for healthy living.
The scoop: Bloomberg’s sources revealed very little about the AI health coach, codenamed “Quartz,” and Apple has not publicly commented on it, but what we do know is that the AI is expected to be available in an app with a monthly subscription.
In exchange for the fee, users will receive personalized suggestions and “motivation” for improving sleep, developing better eating habits, and sticking to exercise plans. It’s not clear whether the motivation will be in the form of notifications, games, incentives, or something else.
The Quartz app is expected to be available in 2024, but Bloomberg’s sources also said it could still be postponed or canceled altogether.
Personalized experience: Apple’s AI health coach will base its recommendations on data from its smartwatch and an emotion-tracking tool where users can write about their mood, respond to questions about their day, and compare entries over time.
Apple aims to predict a user’s mood based on their speech and iPhone usage.
Apple is expected to unveil that emotion-tracking tool at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2023, with plans to then add it to the free Health app in iOS.
In the future, the company hopes to offer an alternative to the manual tracker in Quartz with an algorithm that can predict a user’s mood based on their speech and iPhone usage, including “what words they’ve typed and other data on their devices,” according to Bloomberg.
The big picture: The idea of an AI health coach isn’t new, and we’ve even seen examples that help people manage their weight, stick to diets, and sleep better — all the things Apple expects Quartz to do.
We’ve yet to see any one AI-powered health coach really take off, though, but Apple has a huge customer base, which means its app already has a better shot than most of breaking into the mainstream — even though we know so little about it.
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