WHOOP Podcast - Meet WHOOP Coach: The Most Personalized AI-Powered Performance Coach

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

On this week’s episode, WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed and WHOOP CTO Jaime Waydo are highlighting one of our most innovative features to date – WHOOP Coach. WHOOP Coach delivers an incredibly personalized, incredibly specific performance coaching experience thanks to the latest in generative AI. Will and Jaime will discuss what the WHOOP Coach is (2:47), our partnership with OpenAI (4:15), the key use cases of WHOOP Coach (5:45), how WHOOP Coach is an educational tool (13:00), WHOOP Coach as a membership support tool (15:35), providing insight into the unknown (16:50), data retention and privacy (19:05), the vision of a 24/7 performance coach (21:55), and the technical terms and definitions around Artificial Intelligence (25:10).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with top performers, athletes, researchers, where we also discuss the latest and greatest in WOOP technology. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, and we're on a mission to unlock human performance. We have a really exciting announcement this week, which is that WOOP has just launched the Woop Coach. This is an incredible. personalized, incredibly specific performance coaching experience thanks to the latest and generative AI. The whoop coach takes an in-depth knowledge of someone's goals, unique biometric data, and the latest performance science to generate highly individualized

and conversational responses to your questions. So whatever your question might be about your health and your fitness, you can now ask directly of whoop. We did this in partnership with OpenAI and leveraged ChatGPT, which is the most advanced large language model. And to discuss more about this, I'm joined by our chief technology officer, Jamie Waito. Jamie is a product and technology executive with over 20 years of experience, leading companies including Alphabet, Apple, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Jamie and I discuss the all-new whoop coach and how to use it. asking about data, building training plans, making recipes, and more, our partnership with OpenAI,

how you can use the feature as an educational tool to understand your data and your performance at a higher level, using Woop Coach as a continuation of membership support, and it's now translated in 50 languages, data privacy and anonymity, privacy is still core to our philosophy, and nothing has changed in that regard, and an overview of some of the buzzwords and technical terms

around artificial intelligence and machine learning for those more interested in AI. If you're thinking about joining WOOP and trying the WOOP coach, just go to WOOP.com, sign up for a free 30-day trial. New members can use the code Will WI-L, get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at WOOP.com, call us 508-443-4952. Without further ado, here is the announcement for the all-new Woop Coach. Jamie, great to have you back on the WOOP podcast. I'm so excited to be back. It's always a good sign when I'm interviewing you for a WOOP podcast

because it means we've got an exciting announcement or a big technological leap forwards. So what are we announcing today? Today we are announcing WOOP coach. And the coach is a personalized conversation with WOOP. So you've got 24-7 ability to talk to Woop about you and your data and the questions that you have about your health and fitness. And you can even talk to whoop more broadly about health and fitness in general.

You know, it's a pretty fascinating moment in time. I mean, I've been on whoop now for, you know, 10 years. And one of the things about being on loop for that long is you learn how to sift through your data. You learn how to ask certain questions and find them. But the power of whoop coach and what we're rolling out, today is it's really the first time where you can get at a very specific question instantaneously. That's right.

The other thing that I get really excited about is there's a lot of features and kind of questions that people have about their data that they want WOOP to be able to tell them, but it doesn't make sense for us to build a whole feature, a whole page, a graph. And so this is a way for you to be able to get the information and the coaching that you want based on your data without having to wait for us to release a new feature. So it's almost like you can make whoop your own adventure and your own coaching experience, and that's bespoke to you and the way I use it will be different based on the things I'm interested.

It's worth introducing as well our partner in doing this. We've partnered with OpenAI, which obviously created ChatGPT. Why OpenAI and what are they providing for us? It's a great question. So at the heart of whoop, there has always been AI. And so what we started to look around and say is, like, how do we take that core that is whoop and now make it conversational? And that's where we started looking at what's called large language models, the ability

to take artificial intelligence and have a human-sounding conversation. And so OpenAI is, in my opinion, the best in the world right now. And so we're very lucky we got to partner with them and they're providing that large language model capability to be the conversational part of the WOOP coach. Yeah, and I love underscoring just exactly what this is. So for people listening to this who haven't yet downloaded the app or who are new to WOOP, imagine as you're looking at your WOOP data,

a text box throughout the app where you can actually just ask any question related to your data. And it's worth probably now transitioning to talking about what are some of these questions and where can this go. So what are a few of the things, Jamie, that jump out to you as key use cases for communicating with the WOOP coach? Yeah, I mean, there's kind of the obvious one, which is those questions about what is my data, like what is HRV, what is Zone 2 training? And WOOP can definitely answer those. questions for you and give you a really rich understanding of that. And then if you go a layer deeper, you can start to say, well, like, build me a plan. So for example, you could say, I'm going to do a

5K in three weeks. Build me a training plan for my 5K. And the coach can definitely do that. So now you're starting to get some customization, some coaching around how to achieve those goals that you have. One of my favorite examples was build me a recipe based on the chicken, mayo, and grapes that I have in my refrigerator. And the coach came up and gave a recipe for it. And the employee who was testing Whoop at that time tried it out and said the recipe was delicious. It's a great anecdote because I think it demonstrates, too, just how expansive now the information set is within Whoop. Obviously, whoop coach is this interface where you can now talk to whoop, but the sort of amount of data and resources that comes from our own training on the models, as well as our partnership with OpenAI, you know, now nutrition, as you just called out, is actually something that we have a fairly expansive, you know, set of questions and answers that you can engage with. supplements, you know, some of these things that many of you listen to this have maybe sent me a

message or a DM about, hey, Will, do you take magnesium, you take melaton, you know, you can now ask Whoop about, and you'll get a fairly personalized answer, or you'll get an answer that's based on a collection of population data. Talk a little bit about some of the questions where whoop, how do I, how does my HRV compare to people like me? Or some of the ways that this data that you benefit from the fact that there are so many people on whoop? Yeah, that's kind of the third category that I think about, which is, how do I compare? And because we've got so many members on whoop, and they're all kind of fitness-minded, you start to understand how you fit in comparison of that population.

So you can ask questions like, how does my HRV compare to members like me? And whoop will give you a total breakdown of your HRV is this, members like you who are defined as, you know, female in this age category have an HRV from this range to this range. And so you can get all of those kind of comparative answers. You can also ask how your data today compares to your data over time. So one of the interesting things you could ask is how does my strength trainer workout today compare to a strength trainer workout I did three months ago. And who can start to give you those trends and statistics more easily. So all of that's pretty cool because you don't have to go searching for it. You don't have to look at all of the

different trends charts. You can just ask, and it's right there handed to you. And then there's a deep link that you can click on that will take you to that graph in that part of the app so that you can see the visual of it as well. The other thing that you just touched on, I found quite useful is this notion of deep links. So you'll be in what will feel like a text conversation with WOOP. And maybe you're asking about HRV, maybe you're asking about a specific workout. And then all of a sudden you'll see a deep link to somewhere else in the app or to an information center, the locker, which has all of our content. And it'll be relevant based on your question. So I think many members are going to find Woop Coach a great jumping off point

for sorting essentially through a lot of information or sorting through their own data. Yeah, I mean, keep in mind, whoop is a 10-plus-year-old company. There is a ton of science that has been done in that decade, right? And for a member to be able to read all of the articles, listen to all of the podcasts, and to dig through all of their own personal data,

that's a lot of work. And what the coach does is it allows you to ask a question and then it does all of the work to comb through all of that information because we've built our own AI models to be able to pull all of that for you. And now we can serve that up to you in three paragraphs or less. Yeah, it's really powerful. We're going to get to how did we create this in the training in a second. I want to make sure we get through more of the capabilities as well.

There's so much. I think one thing people will find fascinating is just to double down. on this recommendations, this notion of what workout should I do today. And, you know, I like to exercise. For me, it's been a very powerful way to just zero in on, okay, what's the minimum viable thing I could do today? If I've got more time, what's the thing, you know, the harder thing to do? I asked whoop, what workout should I do?

And it was able to look at, you know, all of my prior activities, it was able to recommend, I think my strain target for the day was like a 12. And it was able to recommend running, which only required maybe 25 minutes. Versus, you know, it also acknowledged I could get there with golf, which might have taken four hours or something. So to be able to really zero in on what should you do, given your target. And based on what you like to do, like you like to run, you like to play golf. Sure.

For me, it recommends cycling or running or yard work. Yeah. And then it was interesting on days that I have a higher strain target. it would often recommend squash because most of my squash workouts are higher strain. Same with Strength Trainer. So this is an area where you'll also see Whoop continue to invest, right? Where the workouts will continue to get more sophisticated. Over time, you'll be able to have Strength Trainer build you workouts

or the coach will build you a workout that you can then do in Strength Trainer. So I encourage everyone listening to this. Try what workouts should I do today and experiment on that level. And if you're traveling, definitely try it. This is one of the coolest examples. I was at dinner with an employee who's traveling into Boston this week. And he said, Jamie, I went to the hotel this morning, and I said, Whoop, tell me what workout I should do today.

My limitation is I have an hour, and I'm at a hotel gym. And Whoop Coach recommended workouts that should work in a hotel gym, and it was spot on, and then gave a recommendation of to hit the strain target in only an hour, you should be at a brisk enough pace if you run on the treadmill, where you should be out of breath and not be able to have a conversation. It's pretty amazing, and it's going to keep getting better over time. That's the nature of large language models. You know, you'll notice a thumbs up, thumbs down for all the questions that you ask group

and the answers you get. So I would encourage people to use that mechanism. It helps us learn. It helps the coach learn what you like. Let's hit on a couple more topics. You know, broadly speaking, education. Yeah. It seems like that's a big theme for what you can do with whoop coach.

I think that's right. You know, I think everybody comes to whoop with their own goal in mind. Some people want to lose weights. Some people want to crush it for the marathon. on. And so really understanding whoop and the ability to help you get to your goal as quickly as possible is a place where I think the whoop coach can really help. So you can ask questions around what's my HRV so that you start to get that education understanding of what does that number actually mean and what does it mean for you? What is restorative sleep? Why

does it matter? Build me a routine so that I sleep more deeply. And so the coach is, you know, behind the scenes figuring out how to do that and serve you up the most actionable information that's bespoke to you every step of the way and i think people will find this you know both general and specific which is exciting so you can have a very general question and you'll get a general response about how do we define hrv what are characteristics of hrb or things you can do and prove it but you can also ask a very specific question i asked it the other night i was with a few friends having a drink, and I asked Whoop, what will happen to my recovery if I have three drinks tonight?

And so it was able to tell me with each successive drink how my resting heart rate was likely to increase, how my heart rate variability was likely to decrease, what my REM sleep would even be. And so it was just a really fascinating combination of the Whoop Journal and this new feature of Woop Coach, and then, of course, the fact that you're wearing a 24-7 wearable, you know, I don't think there's another product in the world that can actually answer that question the way Woop had. And so I think it's quite powerful. And I think what's cool is there's infinite numbers of those questions that our members have. And instead of waiting

for us to build the feature, build the graph, figure out, you know, how we want to display that information, where it's going to enter and exist in the app, now the world is your oyster. everybody can ask whatever questions they want and have access to that information that's exactly serving you what you want to know. And I don't think there is another product in the world that does that. We trained a lot of this data on membership services data, on troubleshooting resources that we've built over years. Talk a little bit about how folks can now use this as a continuation of support.

Yeah, I mean, that's another great part of the app, and a way that people can use this feature is to be able to say, hey, I don't know how to charge my whoop. It's the first time I took it out of the box. How does charging work? As an example. And we get that question a lot. And right now, the way that works is you ask membership services and you wait for a person to come back and answer that question for you. Now it's at your fingertips. Whoop will just answer that and talk to you immediately and give you exactly what you need. And coming soon, we'll actually put like little animated gifts in there to help you even see it visually. Yeah, it's a great way. If in the back of your mind, you're like, I don't

quite understand this or this doesn't feel like it's working properly. You can ask the loopcoach and you'll get that validated quickly. Totally. One area I'm very excited about is languages. The language model part is powered by open.a.I. I think they just unlocked like 75 or 80 languages. Great. So every time they add capability, WOOP has that ability immediately to be able to speak all of those languages.

There you go. The insight into the unknown, I think, is one last theme I want to touch on with Woop Coach. Questions like, why am I tired? Am I getting sick? Yep. You know, why am I run down?

Why do I feel so energetic? You know, why am I happy? Like, these are, I think, questions that everyone has about their own body that have been hard to put a finger on and may touch a variety of different data points and behaviors and physiology, how does whoop coach delve into that? I mean, the cool thing about whoop coach is it's got access to all of your data. And so, because it's whoop. And so whoop can now start to help you make sense of that data. And so, you know, a lot of members talk to me about why is my

recovery in the yellow, but I feel great today. And it's like, well, what's your HRV? How hydrated were you last night? How much alcohol did you drink last night? How long was your stress high while you were sleeping? And so now the Woop Coach puts all of that together and gives you that answer without you having to try to figure it out for yourself. Yeah, I think about how powerful this would have been during the era of COVID too. Well, we're in a COVID resurgence right now. Yeah, well, I mean, it's just a question of how do you know if you're sick and are there data points you can look at. I had this moment where I had an elevated respiratory rate. I was trying to figure out, is it because I'm potentially getting sick or is it because

I've been at altitude? And whoop can help you answer some of those questions or think through it. Definitely. I've definitely asked whoop coach, am I getting sick? Or I don't feel great today, am I sick? And whoop coach will come back and give me an announcement. of here are the things that the data says about are you sick or are you not sick? So there's a lot there. I think people listening to this, go play with it, ask it questions.

Let's talk a little bit about privacy, security, data retention. You know, these are big themes for whoop. They're things we care a lot about. We've published privacy principles over the years. How have we done this in a way to keep member data safe? I mean, I think to start, WOOP starts with privacy and security before we build anything. That's the heart of what we do. And so WOOP has been built on that foundation from day one.

And this feature is no difference. And so the way we think about it is the way we think about everything. Your data is your data. We don't sell it. we don't do anything with it, it's yours. And when we started working with a third party, we worked very hard with them, so they have zero retention. They don't save any of your data. They don't look at any of your data. Your data stays within everything that you've always known with whoop. And we don't ever send any of what's called PII, personal identifiable information.

So we don't send your name. We don't send your location. None of that leaves the four walls of whoop. And so we've worked very hard. And there's a lot of really tricky technology underneath the hood to be able to do that where whoop coach knows your name. But the way we send information to be able to get the large language model to give a response doesn't know your name. And so we weave a lot of those pieces back together on the whoop side to be able to protect your data and still give you the experience of a natural language coaching conversation with WOOP. Yeah, I love this point about zero retention. Zero.

There's no amount of data or information that's leaving WOOP that's going to any third party and staying with them. And never will. So we've been able to build this feature with a very robust, large language model that doesn't in any way compromise our privacy principles. And if you look at the industry, I actually am a little concerned about the way a lot of technology players are starting to use large language models without putting that protection in place for consumers. Yeah. And I will say, like, that was not the default when we went in. We worked very, very hard and very, very closely. And that's why we talk about open.a.I. as a partner. Because in partnership together, we really worked to make. sure that all of the principles that we hold very dear, that the commitments that we've made to our

members continue to be true. I was just sitting here before our podcast thinking about this moment in time and this big release, and it reminded me of the vision document I wrote earlier this year about this idea of loop becoming a 24-7 performance coach. And in many ways, this announcement is a real continuation of that vision because a coach should be someone who's available to you at all times and who can answer questions for you. And now we have that built into the product, this idea that it's fully accessible,

It can answer any questions that come to mind. It handles health and fitness. It incorporates so many different data points that otherwise would be hard for you to go out and find and track down. So it's, I think, really exciting. What are a couple things that you're looking forward to in terms of how we're going to be building on top of this? Because like all things, whoop, the first release is not the last, right?

We keep beating the drum and we want to keep coming out with more stuff. Yeah. You know, we think a lot about how to go both deeper with the capabilities, so how can it go and continue to add more and more data and information so that it gets smarter and smarter, it can start to help you look at your data through more and more different aspects of you as a 360 human. We also think about it getting faster, so you'll notice now that it's about three seconds latency before that first conversation. starts and we want that to be even faster so that it feels just like a conversation like you and I are having. And then, you know, I think you'll start to see that it'll start to draw graphs and visualize the information for you. It's going to start to feel more natively integrated into all of the features at WOOP. You know, we're right now working on the roadmap for what are we building next year. And the whole conversation with every feature we're talking about for next year

is how does coach weave into this? And so it's becoming an integral part of everything we think about and how we build at WOOP. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty unbelievable just how fundamentally this shifts the way you even think about wearing a 24-7 wearable. I mean, you can imagine in the long run a lot of your day-to-day understanding of your body

just comes through these simple questions you might be asking the WOOP coach. And today, of course, this is a very technical, based interface, but you can imagine over time it's a more voice-based interface where you're just hey whoop, what workout should I do? It tells you back. Whoop, how is my workout? When should I go to bed? And it's just a conversation. It's almost like you've seen a demo on that. So anyway, we're giving a little away here, but there's a lot coming and hopefully people are excited about that. Why don't we close out here with just a little bit

of the nitty-gritty on AI. I know a lot of people listening to this probably have some fascination by AI. There's a lot of different buzzwords getting thrown around more broadly in the industry. Why don't you describe, in your own words, what is AI? I mean, AI stands for artificial intelligence. And it's really one of the newer frontiers in tech. So it's a really fun place to be. But basically, it's taking a bunch of information and training a model to be able to take

that information and do. a project with it or create an outcome with it and there's different ways in which you can do that you can do that with reinforcement learn models where you give it a goal and it's trying to always achieve the goal you can do it with a bunch of different pathways at whoop what's really cool is the coach leverages so many different ways in which you build artificial intelligence machine learned models and so it's not just the large language model that's under the hood there's trained models that are taking in data and there are reinforcement learned models that are trying to help you achieve your goals and all of those are weaving together to make one feature and

one interface for you to talk to whoop but under the hood there's like 15 different machine learned models that we've built there's all of this technology that's gone into it and and what I love about this feature in particular is this was seated back in, I don't know, March probably, where I started talking to the team and I was like, look, this chat GPT thing, like there's something here, it's a feature. We didn't have a team, we didn't have people working on it,

and he started working on Friday nights, and we'd deliver pizza. I remember you'd go buy and say hi. And the team just started kind of naturally forming and working on it because they were so excited. And so now I think what's happened is that, turned into a feature team, and it was really born out of, you know, a vision of what this technology could do, an understanding of all of the great capabilities we have at Woop,

and then how we put all of that together into something that can really be that 24-7 coach on demand anytime you want it. It was a good reminder for me, too, that, like, the best engineers are drawn to the best technical challenges, right? There is an aspect of that where we had, a bunch of different people in this building speaking about our office that we're just so excited at the idea of working on large language models that they just really dove in on it was like moths to a flame yeah like you couldn't push them away and we let them all work on it

the people who were attracted to it got to work on it and that's another thing I always think as a leader and as someone building technology is when you let the team pick what they work on the passion shows in the product. And I think you're really going to see that the Woop Coach is a passion project. And we're so excited for what it's going to unlock for all of our members and for their health and for their fitness goals. Well, I'm really excited about this launch. I know the whole company is really excited about this launch.

In many ways, it just feels like a continuation on our mission to unlock human performance, on our vision to build a 24-7 performance coach. So, Jamie, thank you for all the work you and the team's done on it. All right. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Jamie and me discuss the all-new whoop coach, a reminder to download the latest whoop app. Make sure you've got all the latest and greatest tech at your fingertips.

If you're not on whoop, this is a good time to check it out. Whoop.com sign up for free 30 days and see whether you like it. you get the full experience for free for 30 days. If you like this podcast, please leave a rating or review. Please subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at Woop at Will Amid. If you have a question, once you answered on the podcast, email us. Podcast at Woop.com.

Call us 508443-4952. New members can use the code Will. Get a $60 credit on Woop Accessories at checkout. And that's a wrap. Thank you all for listening. I think you're going to love this new feature. We'll catch you next week on the Woop Podcast. as always, stay healthy and stay in the green.