Fitbot, the fitness personal assistant (Review)

Overview:

Fitbot is a fitness assistant and guided workout app designed to help you get a routine and get in shape without the need for a personal trainer or gym.

Developer: RoboBot Studio

Cost: Free (with ads and microtransactions)

Impressions:

Fitbot is an app with a fitness focus and an interesting concept. It advertises guided workouts, rep counting and more all using fully voiced guides from a sort of “workout personal assistant.” IT certainly has a lot going for it in the guided workouts, the app features a good amount of workouts which describe the actions you’ll need to take as well as exactly what you may need to complete it properly, like dumbells or mats and chairs.

The guides are rather sparse on strong detail, however, simply describing the basics in a concise manner and offering no corrections in case you do it wrong. Also, the categories are centralized on specific body areas, but you can’t sort the workouts any other way so finding a specific one takes some time if you don’t know where it’s located.

I’m an exercise newbie so many of the workouts featured were foreign to me and I had some trouble figuring out if I was doing them correctly, but the app did feature some handy if crudely animated tutorials that sort of helped show me what to do.

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I must say, the “workout virtual assistant” leaves a lot to be desired, as it is not much more than text-to-speech and offers no real interaction or voice-activated features. The app simply reads out the description of the workout and counts reps and keeps time. The voice is also the standard Google Assistant voice which gets rather grating after hearing it for long periods just counting at you.

Fitbot also has some neat health-tracking features such as water intake counter, a progress graphing system that charts your workouts over time as you complete them, and other handy tracking features for showing your progress. I do wish it integrated into Google Fit or other exercise apps or smart devices like my Moto 360 for step counting, but it’s limited only to the FItbot app.

The app features an XP system and microtransactions to get more XP, but I’m not entirely sure what the XP is used for or why it’s necessary. You gain XP from completing workouts and challenges pertaining to workouts, but there isn’t a clear progression system or reward besides more XP. It’s not clearly defined and needs some work for sure.

The app’s interface is also a mess, with poorly formatted text and odd color choices making it difficult to read and find out what you are supposed to do. The main screen is an odd button I think turns on the voice assistant but I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. The workout screens are not the clearest but they are not exactly exciting either.

Conclusion:

Fitbot offers at least some handy features in regards to helping you learn new workouts you can try at home to stay in shape, and providing at least a basic framework for getting it right so you don’t hurt yourself. The app would also benefit from integration with external devices like FitBits or smart watches and also some third-party apps to give you a complete picture of your workout. That being said, Fitbot isn’t all bad and the workout guides and rep counting features are functional enough that you could legitimately use this as a tool to help you if you desired.

Download Fitbot from the Google Play Store