Smart ring company Oura has announced its take on AI resources for its members with its Oura Advisor. Oura Advisor is part of Oura Labs, an in-app platform that allows members to participate in experimental features. The new Oura Advisor is an AI-based tool that “harnesses AI to empower members to achieve their health goals with personalized insights, recommendations, and encouragement,” the company said in its press release. The new feature will alert you to changes in body signals, which could potentially indicate illness or overtraining.
Oura Personalized AI Coaching
Making changes and achieving fitness goals on your own without a coach can be extremely challenging, especially if you aren’t a fitness expert (which most of us aren’t). But paying for a coach is out of reach for many. The Oura Advisor aims to step in and effectively be your coach.
One of the best parts of working with a coach as opposed to following a training plan is that you can more easily adjust and customize your training. Likewise, Oura Advisor allows members to customize their “coaching intensity and focus areas, providing tailored support for targeted lifestyle changes.”
Customizable Coaching Intensity
Mats Kyyrö, Senior Director of Product, specified that “Oura Advisor’s core personality is always the same: it reflects Oura’s values and beliefs of what balanced and holistic wellness looks like. However, we know that a single approach doesn’t fit every member.”
To address individual needs, there are multiple tonality settings to choose from based on your goals. “The ‘Relaxed’ setting asks the Advisor to focus on supporting your own personal choices, even when, at times, those choices go against the story your data tells us,” explained Kyyrö. “The ‘Goal-oriented’ setting makes the Advisor a bit more firm, refocusing you when you are not showing progress in areas that you’ve promised to pay attention to. The default setting, ‘Mentoring,’ balances between these two to meet you where you are each day.”
24/7 AI Coach Availability
Since the Oura Advisor is a chat-based conversational assistant, you’ll also be able to chat directly with your AI coach. The AI Advisor keeps conversations from the same day in the same thread and converts those older than a day into “Memories,” which it can still reference in future conversations. Since it isn’t a human coach, members will have 24/7 access to their AI health coach.
Integration and Safety Measures
Of course, the Oura platform already provides advice and recommendations based on your data. Kyyrö explained that with this initial release, the “Oura Advisor will be relatively self-contained, meaning the advice and guidance it generates is not visible on other app surfaces beyond the Advisor chat itself.” The AI coach will leverage goals you’ve entered into the Oura app as one input, “but members can tell it about their other goals in their own words, and thanks to the “Memories” feature, the Advisor will be able to carry those goals forward into future conversations.”
With health and fitness recommendations, there’s a concern that Oura Advisor could provide bad, or even dangerous, advice. Kyyrö explained that its AI coach “is designed with the safety of our members in mind and employs various mechanisms and guardrails to prevent harmful responses.” However, he also admits “that current conversational AI models have inherent limitations and that there is always the possibility that low-quality responses are generated in a way that we did not discover in our internal testing.”
Oura Labs Beta Program
This is one of the reasons Oura Advisor is only available through Oura Labs, its beta program for members, as opposed to a full release. This way, Oura can collect feedback from members on the quality of responses to improve Oura Advisor before broadly releasing the AI coach.
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