Amazon Debuts Halo View Fitness Band With Screen and Expanded Health Programs
Amazon introduced a new version of its Halo fitness band called the Halo View at its annual hardware and device event this week. The tech giant announced the latest wearable in conjunction with the premiere of the new Halo Fitness and Halo Nutrition exercise and diet-focused services.
See Your Halo
Amazon is rolling out the Halo View a little over a year after the initial, screenless version and about six months since owners could start connecting the wearable to Alexa. The Halo View essentially incorporates a display screen and haptic feedback to go with the various health-related measurement and tracking tech. The screen is limited to a few measurements, but the narrower focus makes the $80 wearable cheaper than many smartwatches and even a bit less than the $100 cost of the current model, though Amazon hasn’t said if that’s just an introductory price.
Like its predecessor, the Halo View can track workouts, sleep and other activity, and blood oxygen levels. It will also display any notifications or alerts that pop up on the Halo mobile app. The two related programs unveiled with the Halo View leverage the smart device as a way for people to monitor and improve their health. Halo Nutrition tracks what people eat and offers tools for healthy meal planning, including recipes. Halo Fitness connects the real-time tracking of a user’s health during any of the hundreds of classes recorded for those interested in the remote exercise lessons. Buying a Halo View earns a year’s worth of membership to both programs, which costs $4 a month otherwise.
Vocal Halo
“Customers tell us Halo is having a meaningful impact on their lives, offering important insights and tools they need to meet their health goals. We’re excited to add even more to Halo, with new experiences to help members work out and nourish their bodies, plus Halo View—a new fitness tracker that adds a display, lowers the price, and comes bundled with a full year of Halo membership,” Amazon Halo vice president Melissa Cha said. “These new additions are a significant step forward in our mission to offer a great value service that’s always getting better and enable customers to better understand their health.”
Audio and visual tech has improved fast enough to enable Amazon to combine the two on what would normally be a more expensive kind of device. The new Halo continues to support the same voice AI elements as its previous iteration. Small microphones can hear and process audio spoken to the device. The voice assistant can then report on activity scores, sleep habits, body composition, or anything else measured by the device. Amazon didn’t mention any specific updates for the existing AI elements for Halo. The same microphones support Halo’s Tone feature for analyzing the sound of a wearer’s voice. Tone clocks voice speed, pitch, rhythm, and intensity.
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