Amazon’s Halo fitness tracker is getting integrated with Alexa

Amazon has announced a new feature for its Halo fitness tracking gadget: Alexa integration. With this new feature, Halo owners will be able to request Alexa health devices for various health statistics, such as their sleep score or activity points obtained during the day. Integration will be disabled by default and owners will need the latest firmware on their Halo bands and the latest version of the iOS or Android app to enable it. Amazon says the feature’s launch starts today, March 4, and will continue over the next week or so.

The band Halo is Amazon’s first fitness-oriented product and has had less than a stellar reception since it was announced last fall. In addition to the standard fitness stuff of tracking your movements and sleep patterns, the $ 99.99 Halo also has the ability to police the tone of your voice and tell you when you are being indifferent or condescending to your words. The complementary Halo app also has a feature to scan your body in 3D using your phone’s camera and measure the composition of your fat. These two unconventional features have been criticized by reviewers in publications such as THE New York Times and Washington Post (which is actually owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos), both for its invasion and for its inconsistency.

Strangely, although Halo has been available for purchase since mid-December (it was first released with a limited distribution and only for guests), it is out of stock in all sizes and colors on Amazon now, with no information on when it can. turn back. I asked Amazon about this and the company declined to comment, although other retailers, such as Best Buy, appear to have plenty of inventory. At the time of this writing, Halo had a 3.7 star rating from Amazon customers, compared to the 4.6 star rating that Fitbit Inspire 2 has of similar size and price.

Amazon notes that Alexa’s integration only allows Alexa to provide information related to the health data captured by Halo – Alexa won’t be able to do the tone analysis on its own. It will also not store Halo data as part of its responses. There is an option to set a voice PIN to protect access to Halo data, and you can choose to have a timeout window of five minutes after the PIN is entered to facilitate access to Halo data on subsequent requests.

Although the Halo integration works with all Alexa-enabled devices, including smart monitors, it has no special optimization for those with screens. If you want to see any tables or graphs of your fitness data, you will have to go to the Halo smartphone app.

Amazon says that Halo owners will be able to disable the integration of the Halo app at any time if they decide they no longer want to, and can manage and delete voice recordings of their Halo requests on the Alexa app’s privacy hub.