- Google Health’s AI chatbot is leaving users frustrated
- Reports say it regularly hallucinates workouts that never happened
- Social media has been flooded with complaints in recent days
The timing couldn’t be worse for Google; just as its slew of new devices launches, including the Google Pixel Watch 5, complaints about the Google Health app and its premium AI Health Coach are reaching fever pitch.
One Fitbit user who posted to Reddit saying that their device’s Google Health app had created a workout summary that seemed to be completely made up, stating “I have a Fitbit Inspire, it just does not have the capability to do form analysis. All of these stats are made up.” .
They’re far from the only person to complain about the app. The problem seems to lie with Google Health’s AI assistant. It’s designed to summarize your health metrics and give you tips on how to improve — from early bedtimes to workout and diet suggestions — but users are noticing that it seems to be prone to hallucinating workouts that simply did not happen.
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People have reported Google Health giving them “wildly incorrect” exercise numbers, mistaking walking or even folding laundry for swimming workouts, imagining 5am runs and house moves that never occurred, and more.
One person was even able to get Google Health to list all the false statements it had made regarding the user’s workouts, dubbing them “Nonstop lies from the AI.” As a commenter put it, “Imagine if a personal trainer lied to your face and then said: ‘Oopsie Daisy! I made those up.’”
And it’s not just limited to physical activity. Fitbit customers have taken to social media to protest that Google Health keeps asking how their cruise is going even though they’ve told the AI that it’s yet to occur. Another user took their Fitbit off for a couple of hours — with no heartbeat being recorded during that time — only to see that Google Health believed they’d been sleeping in that time.
“Fun fact: If someone is sleeping and their heartrate is 0, it’s called being dead,” the user dryly remarked.
‘A bit of a mess’
These users certainly aren’t alone in their annoyance. When we reviewed the Fitbit Air, we lamented that the design of its Google Health app was “a bit of a mess, and not intuitive to use, with features dotted all over the place.” While we found its AI integration to be useful, we noted that “its constant chirpy summaries and insistence on hiding my data inside walls of text became annoying.”
We reached out to Google with a list of questions about whether its Google Health app is hallucinating user workouts. We haven’t heard back yet, but will update this story when we do.
The situation has become so bad that some users have begun speculating that Google Health might be entirely coded by AI agents, such is its tendency to dream up data and produce anomalous behavior. While we have no way of knowing if that’s actually the case, it aptly demonstrates the level of user frustration with Google’s app.
Whatever the truth, it’s clear that something is going wrong with Google Health for a lot of users, and it’s leaving them exasperated and ending their AI subscriptions. It should serve as a warning to any company that wants to integrate AI and health data: with sensitive information like this, mistakes are rarely tolerated.
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alexblake.techradar@gmail.com (Alex Blake)
