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The Oura Advisor, an AI feature formerly tucked away in Oura’s beta testing program, is now rolling out to all Oura Ring customers. It takes the form of a chatbot that you can start a conversation with at any time from within the Oura app—plus the Advisor promises to “check in” with you daily, weekly, or three times a week, depending on what you request. But do you actually want it to do any of those things?
What does the Oura Advisor do?
Credit: Beth Skawrecki
Honestly, this seems to be a pretty standard fitness app AI—meaning that all it really does is restate metrics from the app in a more conversational tone. The Advisor itself told me that it “analyze[s] your Oura data to provide insights and guidance tailored to your health goals.” Its language is in the same style as the little encouraging sentences you get on the Oura home screen, and it tends to repeat the same kinds of advice.
When you open a chat with the Advisor, it asks what you’d like to talk about. So far I haven’t gotten it to tell me anything that wasn’t already obvious from other screens of the app. When I asked why my resting heart rate has been high lately, it gave a generic list of reasons that a resting heart rate might be high for anyone. When I asked it for an “insight” (since it told me that its job is to provide insights), it told me my cardiovascular age, which is a metric that also appears on my app home screen.
How to turn on the Oura Advisor
Until recently, you had to opt in to Oura Labs (the beta testing program) to access the Advisor. It’s still rolling out to all users, so if you want to try it in the meantime, you can turn on any Oura Labs features you like by going to the menu in the top left corner, selecting Oura Labs, and choosing what “experiments” you’d like to turn on. (There is currently a meal tracking feature, and a “heart check-in.”)
You do have to use the app in English, although Oura says they’re planning to offer the Advisor in other languages in the future. Once the Advisor is enabled, you can tap the “+” in the bottom right corner (the same place you would add an activity or start a meditation session) and choose Advisor. This opens up the chat, and from this screen you can also adjust the Advisor’s settings.
How to change settings and delete “memories” on the Oura Advisor
In the chat, you can tap a settings icon in the upper right corner of the screen. The available settings are:
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Style: Conversational, conversational, or direct. I can’t tell if the two “conversational” options are different, or if the duplication is an error on Oura’s part.
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Check-in notifications: Daily, three times a week, or weekly; you can also set whether your preferred time of day is morning, afternoon, or evening (or any combination)
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Memories: The Advisor remembers things you’ve told it about yourself. My Memories section has “The user participates in competitive weightlifting,” and “the user has been sick,” both things I told it directly in our conversations. You can delete a memory by tapping the trash can icon next to it.
There is also a button to “reset” the advisor, which means all settings, conversations, and memories will be deleted.
To test what it’s getting from its memories, I asked the advisor if its data suggested I was getting sick. With the “memory” of my illness, it said yes, and suggested I might want to focus on recovery today. After deleting that memory, I asked the same question again. It said that my resting heart rate suggests I’ve been under some stress, and that I might want to focus on recovery today.
Is the Oura Advisor worthwhile?
So far I haven’t seen the Advisor hallucinate data or say anything inappropriate, but it also hasn’t told me anything I would consider an “insight.” I tried asking it about data that I can’t easily read from the app—like my long term resilience trends—and it said it didn’t have that data available. On the Oura subreddit, most posts about the Advisor seem to be complaints that it isn’t doing anything interesting, but one user said they were able to get the Advisor to talk to them about their meal choices logged with the Meals feature, which is still in beta.
One user said the Advisor helped them to improve their resilience score, but they didn’t provide much information about how it did that, just that they gave the advisor specific information about things like their sleep schedule. Now that the feature has rolled out to more users, perhaps we’ll find out whether more people find it useful.
