New WHOOP Coach Powered by OpenAI (Chat GPT-4)
Must Read: The WHOOP 4 Strap Detailed Review
This is an announcement of things to come to the sports wearables market. Except today it’s already come to WHOOP.
WHOOP’s coaching capabilities have just taken a leap forward and include an advanced generative AI feature powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 which gives WHOOP owners highly individualized, on-demand health and fitness coaching
TL;DR – WHOOP Coach’s AI considers sports science alongside your personal goals and biometrics to give conversational responses to your health and fitness queries (and more!)
Development and Functionality of WHOOP Coach
Whilst WHOOP Coach is new, the company has geared itself towards coaching in a wider sense for years. Most WHOOP owners will be familiar with being coached on the levels of strain (exercise) and sleep needed today.
This core ability was relatively recently expanded by WHOOP Journal which gathers up to 140 behavioural and biological markers both automatically from Apple Health and manually from ‘tags’ you assign to aspects of your daily life.
Once that information was in place, WHOOP Journal automatically searched for insights/correlations to feedback to you – obvious examples being associations like late caffeine intake gives bad sleep but it was probably the less obvious ones that were unique to you which gave you the most insight.
A Deep Dive into AI in Sports Endurance with AI Endurance
AI hit the mainstream in 2023. Here’s a more detailed dive into how a competitor platform properly integrates aspects of machine learning and artificial intelligence into its products. You’ll see **LOTS** of other products claiming to have AI…it will often be disingenuous marketing. At least for a few more years.
How AI Endurance Incorportes AI and ML in its training model (now incorporates chatGPT)
WHOOP Coach In A Nutshell
So the new COACH takes the existing journal and adds a way for you to interact with that data and more using natural language within the app. The AI simply saves you from trawling through reams of data and presents answers in conversational English.
But it goes deeper than the Journal.
Key Features of WHOOP Coach
WHOOP Coach offers a range of features each using the same AI and same interface but the AI accesses different kinds of information from multiple places to leverage different kinds of insights and advice
- Bespoke Training Plans and Recommendations: WHOOP Coach can design custom training plans, routines, recipes, and recommendations to align with your lifestyle and fitness goals be that preparing for a Sub20 5k race or adapting to the demands of a newborn.
- Insights into the Unknown: come from your data, where WHOOP Coach may be able to suggest explanations for fatigue or potential illness.
- Expansive Information on Key Performance Topics: essentially allows the AI to be your personal performance advisor as the coach can access sports science knowledge.
- Detailed Comparisons to Peers: an inquisitive mind should be able to address some of the more obvious insights like “How does my performance compare to my age/sex peer group” as well as forward-thinking ones such as “What behaviours do I have to change to match the best in my age/sex peer group”
- Membership Support: this seems to replace the need to consult a manual or handle account queries with an online agent.
Here are some real-life examples…
WHOOP Coach AI – Thoughts & Conclusions
We shall see more of these types of AI-enabled announcements by sports tech companies over the next few years.
AI in wearables is a populist media bandwagon that companies can currently jump on to guarantee themselves lots of free PR plus genuine interest from some quarters. At the same time, AI can provide insights and knowledge much more easily and flexibly than traditional methods. Imagine the man-hours that go into creating a FAQ knowledge repository and keeping it up to date and the means to access it up to date. Loosely structured information can be much more easily and ‘intelligently’ transformed, and presented in a way that you want to consume it today or that someone else might want in a year’s time. You just have to update the model…not the data it works on.
Even on a super-simple, practical level many people will now surely spend more time in the app learning about themselves in a way that better suits them rather than their old routine of perhaps just looking at one or two key metrics in the morning before getting on with life. That kind of engagement is somewhat of a Holy Grail for marketers which, if done well, will have the knock-on effect to increase customer loyalty which then translates to £$£$£$£$£$.
WHOOP appears to have already put some of the building blocks in place to make this work well from the get-go. Sure, it’s had all the background science knowledge for many years and of course, your data has been steadily accumulating on a daily basis since your membership started. However, the relatively recent JOURNAL additions threw me a bit. The journal seemed like a nice idea where your subjective, textual tagging of your day could be turned into correlations…nice, but hard to access. WHOOP’s AI now seems to easily leverage this and hence the scope for truly personalised responses is significant.
So; I’m quite excited about this development. WHOOP has always had a good story to tell when it comes to innovation. Initially, it made clever use of massive offline data processing capabilities to take the digital noise out of your heart rate readings. Then we had the new silicone anode battery tech introduced to the current generation of the band. Next came elements of velocity-based training to make WHOOP superior to the competition at understanding training load from strength training. Now we have AI. No other mainstream endurance sports tech company has innovated in these particular ways…I’m including Garmin and Apple here.
Whatever you might think about the WHOOP Band, the ecosystem really is streets ahead.
WHOOP 4 Price – Join For Free with a Free Band
Join WHOOP for free. Get a free band, a free joining fee and the first of 6 months’ subscription for free. That’s a lot of free. Starts at Eu/$/£16/mo here at: WHOOP.com
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I found on another tech site examples of possible questions (listed below) you could ask your AI coach…and I am not impressed.
I can only hope that these are just bad examples and that the system will be honed to be this top technology one would expect…but right now…meh!
Training plans
“I have a 10K next month with a goal of running it in under 50 minutes. Can you build me a training program?”
What’s the best way to stay fit while juggling parental responsibilities?”
Health insights
“Why am I so tired?”
Could my fatigue be a sign of illness?
Performance Metrics
“What is HRV?”
“Can you explain the significance of Zone 2 in endurance training?”
Comparative Analysis
“Is my sleep pattern normal for someone in my age group?”
“Why is getting enough Deep sleep important?”
Technical Support
“I’m having issues with my WHOOP’s battery life. What should I do?”
I assume you’ve used chatgpt
what questions would you want to ask?
Longtime big fan of the site, thank you for all your work here.
The questions listed by Hoot look like they are lifted straight from a press release by the other site
I especially like the opinions here which is why I keep coming back and chipping in here as you take the facts on to another level. Not that I always agree with what you say!!!!
More opinions please and less press releases.
As I said….I found the examples on another site gadgets & wearables
I am not using Whoop and I have no interest using it, Garmin provides more than I need and answers most of the question I have, you just have to know where to look. At this point in time, this AI Coach looks like a gimmick to me.
the peer group stuff from whoop is interesting. garmin can say where you are in terms of performance vs your peer group but it cant say what behaviours are used by those ‘better’ than you in your AG that you dont use. I think Suunto did something like that many years ago but the AI gives this sort of thing a greater degree of accessibility with natural language
Decided to give Whoop another go after I last tried it 2 years ago. Very unimpressed, feels like a product made for a very different kind of audience that expects a single number only.
It is as if Garmin used body battery only and had that as the core of their platform. I also found Whoop to be very simplistic and lacking in feature liked connecting to external sensors.
It has taken me a grand total of 3 days to initiate a return…