Fitbit and Microsoft’s Cortana are teaming up to make both fetching and feeding fitness-related commands much easier.
Cortana’s growing set of skills has now added Fitbit, arguably the biggest and most popular wearable maker to its verbal repertoire.
In essence, the functionality is no different than just looking down at your Fitbit. After linking up the Fitbit app with Cortana on your Windows 10 PC, or on your iOS or Android device, Microsoft’s personal assistant immediately knows everything about you.
From the amount of water you’ve had and your daily workout progress to checking your rank on the leaderboard, Cortana takes the most useful info straight from the app and spits it out to you.
Cortana, your new personal trainer
In most scenarios, just looking down at your wearable, whether it’s the Fitbit Charge 2, the Fitbit Blaze or the new Fitbit smartwatch, is much more practical than shouting out a question or command.
But given that the Cortana skill is actually quite robust, taking advantage of it can actually save you some time instead of rummaging through the app. For example, saying “Hey Cortana, Tell Fitbit to log I had a pot roast for lunch” is much faster than clicking around.
Plus, you won’t want to move because, well, you just ate a pot roast.
One complaint about this is that while Microsoft claims that Cortana understands natural language, we wish that the commands were a little more natural in their language.
“Hey Cortana, Ask Fitbit to log I drank 12 ounces of water” isn’t a natural sentence, though it seems to include all of the sentence chunks required for Cortana to take action.
Currently, this Cortana skill is available in the US only, but Microsoft has confirmed that it will be rolling out to more countries.
- You'll find Fitbit all over our list of the best fitness trackers of 2017
