Amazon launches Halo to take on Fitbit, Apple Watch and others

Amazon formally entered the fitness wearables market today by launching a fitness tracker called Halo. As of now, Amazon’s newly launched fitness tracker is available only in the US in Black-Onyx, Blush-Rose Gold and Winter-Silver colour variants at a price of $99.99 ( ₹7,383 approximately) and the Amazon Halo app will come with a monthly membership of $3.99 ( ₹295 approximately). However, Amazon is offering the device at an introductory price of $64.99 ( ₹4,800).

Coming to the features, Amazon Halo is unlike all other fitness trackers that we have up until now. Most fitness trackers, including smartwatches, come with a display that shows information such as heart rate, number of steps taken, call and message notifications among others. Amazon Halo, on the other hand, has no display. It comes with a handwoven band that has the sensors attached to it at the bottom. The sensors look like the Fitbit Inspire sans the display.

Amazon Halo has two microphones and it offers a battery life of up to 7 days. For connectivity, it has Bluetooth 5.0.

Amazon Halo connects to the Amazon Halo app that records and shows all the information such as activity levels, sleep tracking data and stress level. It also suggests steps, both in terms of the physical wellbeing and mental wellbeing, that users can take to improve their overall health.

Barring the design, Amazon Halo, looks like an average fitness tracker. Except it isn’t. It comes with two features that differentiate it from all other fitness trackers available in the market right now. The first feature is called Tone. It analyzes the qualities of your voice like energy and positivity to help strengthen communication. It is powered by the company’s advanced machine learning and speech processing technologies. Amazon says that it’s AI analyzes qualities of the customer's voice such as pitch, intensity, tempo, and rhythm to predict how others would perceive and describe the customer’s tone of voice, which creates a summary you can see and use to identify trends within your life.

The other defining feature of Amazon Halo is called Body. This feature essentially 3D scans a user’s body to measure and track their body fat percentage or BFP. This feature is powered by AI and it has been developed by the company’s computer vision and machine learning team. It includes a suite of algorithms that can generate a user’s personalised 3D body model, BFP, and body model slider, a visual of how their body could change as they gain or lose body fat.

Notably, both features include privacy settings. Users can opt-out of these features anytime. Doing so, Amazon will natively process all the collected data on users’ smartphone and none of the collected data will be stored on Amazon’s servers.