Thoughts on Tech News of Note - 05-29-2026

• It Has to Be Google Health
• Spotify, the new Energizer Bunny of Streaming
• The Ear is the New Sleep Frontier

It Has to Be Google Health
I wore a Fitbit in the early days when it wasn't much more than an adorable clip-on step counter you could put on your waistband or slip into a soft cuff for wearing at night to track how much you moved around while sleeping. It was cheap and it was trendy. Fitbit would of course move on to making bigger and better products over time, until they finally started making devices that encroached upon smartwatch territory and Google had to do something about it. When Google bought Fitbit, I didn't assume it was the end of Fitbit, but I did wonder how they'd go about either successfully incorporating its strengths into their product lineup or destroying yet another beloved brand.

Many sites have reviewed the new Fitbit Air and some others have even outlined the changes to the new Health app that replaces the old Fitbit. I'm not going to aim at either of those goals here. Instead, I want to focus on the inevitable en-googlization of the Fitbit brand, and most especially the app. Google has been dancing around fitness and health for many years now. They had the old Google Fit app that could track multiple aspects of one's health, but for the most part, it was rather manual. You could track steps with your phone or a wearable, but you might need to manually enter some data. If you wanted to track sleep, you needed another app like Sleep As Android. If you wanted to track your blood pressure, you'd enter in the numbers from your blood pressure monitor. Once smartwatches started to become a thing, Fit could in some cases take data from watches, but it was always device dependent and many device manufacturers chose to sync with their own apps. Fit languished in the background as a place where fewer people would go for fitness tracking. When Google launched Health Connect, it revitalized Fit a little bit (hah!) by allowing some data to be synced into Fit from other health apps, so you'd have a better chance of seeing more of the information you cared about in one place. But everything still felt very piecemeal-y, and for a company that once claimed to want to organize the world's information, it didn't feel organized or even particularly informative. Yet even then, there were glimmers of hope that Google was going in a direction that could possibly be a good one.

When Google finally debuted the original Pixel Watch and set up its sync with Fitbit, we knew Google Fit would eventually be retired to the Google graveyard, but that was starting to look like a decent trade-off as the Fitbit app presented the information that most people would want to see and the watch tracked most of that health data in an accurate and consistent way. It looked like the acquisition was starting to pay off. And then after three more generations of the Pixel Watch, Google decided it was time to ramp up the googliness of the app, which naturally means amplifying the AI features. Google's fortunes are becoming more tightly tied to AI and Google Gemini is the heart of everything it is doing in that space. So, of course, Gemini had to get integrated into the app. Other fitness wearables were already starting to build in AI coaching features that could provide deeper insights, answer health and fitness questions, and help one build a plan to reach any number of fitness goals. Even Samsung, a company that has largely hitched its AI success to the Gemini train, was starting to build in intelligence to help people become better runners. Whoop and Oura were on that track as well. Google needed to capitalize on its strengths; no other company in fitness has the resources and pre-existing capabilities needed to power intelligent coaching and advisory features that can be helpful to people at all levels of fitness. Whether anyone wanted this or not didn't matter - Google needed to set the tone here. It couldn't afford to be left behind in an area where it already arguably held a lead.

And because Google is a technology leader with its own frontier AI models, we can expect that Google will continue to dial up the AI features and capabilities of its fitness app. And this means the name had to change. It is Gemini that powers Health and it is Google that powers Gemini. The devices can continue to be Fitbit or not, but the app has to be Google, and it has to have Gemini. This is an opportunity for Google to continue to push the power of AI to regular people, hopefully in a way that they will find beneficial and meaningful.

And if not, there's still Garmin.

Spotify, the New Energizer Bunny of Streaming
In Spotify's ever-grander scheme to win back old subscribers like me who value a variety of content, Spotify's streaming service can now include human and AI narration of more than 650 articles from publications such as Wired, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. Each article is no longer than two hours long and are produced in-house by Spotify. For premium subscribers, accessing this content library will eat into their monthly 15-hour audiobook allowance and free users can buy access to individual articles for $1.99 each. Spotify sees this offering as an introduction (i.e. gateway drug) to longer content like podcasts and full-length audiobooks. This builds upon recent additions of auto-generated podcasts and fitness content from Peloton. All of these recent changes are ostensibly extensions of Spotify's self-declared "Year of Raising Ambition", wherein the leadership team is driving the company toward a greater use of technology and is pursuing greater diversity in content for the platform.

This diversification effort is ultimately critical for Spotify. With the exception of Deezer, which went public in 2022, most other popular music streaming services roll up to larger companies with bigger bank accounts. Spotify has to survive on the merits of the service it provides and has to attain and attract customers based on the appeal of that service. It's not enough to just stream music or even provide streaming products available only on its platform. It needs to stand out in such a way that people will pay for its highest-priced offerings so that it can continue to expand and improve upon the platform. And with its announcements over the last few months, it does look like Spotify is aiming to stand head and shoulders above its competition. Adding audiobooks gave it an angle to appeal to customers that might otherwise head in Amazon's direction. Having well-known podcasts on the platform might help keep people in its app longer rather than heading over to the Apple Podcasts app or any number of other podcast players. Finally adding a high-resolution audio tier keeps audio snobs and audiophiles from defecting to other players like Tidal or Qobuz. And with the new features allowing for custom generated audio content and news content from professional providers, Spotify can give some listeners fewer reasons to head to news apps or the browser to keep up with what's going on in the world when they may not want to devote the time to listen to a dedicated long-form news podcast or read news articles themselves. Spotify is really aiming to compete for eyeballs and ears by appealing to as many listeners as possible because they know that is how they will survive against the big tech companies, including indirect but dangerous competitors like TikTok and YouTube. With a current market cap of ~$100B, Spotify isn't a tiny company, but the bigger they can get, the better chance they have at remaining independent and providing people with an option from a company whose focus is not divided, and its livelihood is dependent entirely on the service it provides.

They keep on going and going, because otherwise they die.

The Ear Is the New Sleep Frontier
This week, Anker released its Soundcore Sleep A30 wireless earbuds designed for wear while sleeping and start-up SOND introduced its Dreambuds, an "AI-powered in-ear system" that is designed to actively interfere with your sleep patterns, hopefully in a helpful way.

The Soundcore Sleep A30 are an updated version of an idea that has been around for years, arguably pioneered by Bose and their legendary Sleepbuds. That idea is that many of us sleep in less-than-ideal auditory conditions. Earplugs have been a common solution to this problem, but what if you could listen to soothing sounds or have noise-canceling technology in earbuds to give you an even more comfortable sound scape for pleasant dreams? That has been the core push for sleep buds, as I'll now do a Xerox/Kleenex and call them that for the remainder of this segment. Sleep buds need to be small and comfortable, so they aren't an issue for side sleepers, and they need to have enough battery life to make it through a typical 6-9 hours of sleep, or at least until you've fallen asleep, if the buds are smart enough to detect this. The Sleep A30 can stream calming sounds to help you drift off to sleep and while you are sleeping, they can track your sleep duration, number of awakenings, and time spent in various sleeping positions. The data is stored and presented in an app so that you can track your current and historical sleep performance to better identify trends and opportunities for improvement.

But the SOND Dreambuds are aiming to go a bit further than the Sleep A30. SOND was founded by former Bose and Google employees. Instead of just aiming to reduce or mask external noise, the Dreambuds track several physiological markers like respiration rate and heart rate variability. In that regard, it reads more like a health tracker than just some earbuds you wear while sleeping. Using a cloud-based AI system, audio programs are generated in real-time that are designed to enhance sleep based on your current sleep performance. The Dreambuds are designed to be much more independent than typical sleep buds; the charging case has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, an OLED display, and a speaker. Users can create their sleep plans and consult with the AI sleep coach by using the case rather than having to rely solely on their smartphone. But there is an app included in the system that allows one to view and track sleep data over time.

The Dreambuds are available now via Kickstarter, an approach that comes with risks for backers. The campaign has already surpassed its meager $10K funding goal and the startup itself has $7M in funding, so now it's a matter of execution and delivery. For people who are used to the potential pitfalls of Kickstarter, pricing starts at $449. This seems expensive for sleep buds, but it's also true that very few, if any, sleep buds track as many data points as these buds aim to track. SOND says they plan to ship to backers by the end of the year. It will be interesting to see if these buds live up to their promises, but it seems like all the necessary hardware that's needed for these to be successful already exists and someone just needed to put it together.

The future of health tracking is still very much up in the air with all the existing and potential future form factors. We haven't yet seen the best approach for tracking health and fitness but the company that can put the best features together into an intelligent system that works together whether you sleep on a specialized mattress, wear a ring, watch, wristband, headband, earphones, sleep buds, glasses, or make use of some other new form factor may be the winner in the future.

Someone just needs to figure out how to put all the pieces together.

Purchase links:

Soundcore Sleep A30 (Amazon affiliate link): https://amzn.to/43ImpYN

Soundcore Sleep A30 (Soundcore official): https://www.soundcore.com/products/d1301-sleep-a30-smart-anc-earbuds-for-sleeping?variant=45742504116414

SOND Dreambuds: https://sond.com/