While I did originally think I’d never use this, I decided around the beginning of October to try this feature out, just to see what it was like. Here are some observations:
- To summarize before I start, it’s really not as bad as I feared it would be. It’s not constantly interrupting your workouts with cheery encouragements, but instead announces some stats about your recent workout history shortly after the workout starts (most of the time), will announce some fairly useful and benign stats at intervals (if you have that setting turned on for the workout), or will announce pace, heart rate, power, cadence, time, or track lap alerts (but only if you have those turned on for the workout), will occasionally announce some stats mid-workout (such as “Congratulations! You’ve done 16,500 minutes of running workouts so far this year!”), and will give a summary of a workout when you’ve completed it (most of the time.) It will also sometimes tell you when you have closed any of the Move, Exercise, or Stand ring goals. (I always exercise in the morning so I have never heard about the stand ring being closed, but I assume that it does so.) But in the six weeks I’ve had this turned on, I’ve never had a random announcement of encouragement in the middle of a workout.
- Just a reminder, Workout Buddy is available for Running, Walking, Hiking, Cycling, Elliptical, Stair-stepper, High-Intensity Interval Training (aka HIIT), and Strength Training Workouts. It requires a paired iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence (so, Apple 15 Pro, any 16 model, and any 17 model, including the Air) which you must carry with you - it’s the iPhone that actually creates all of the buddy announcements - and with Bluetooth headphones connected to either the iPhone or the Watch during the workout. I know that many people get an Apple Watch for workouts specifically so that they don’t need to carry an iPhone with them when they workout outdoors, so those people won’t get this feature at all.
- This feature is not turned on by default. When you open the workout app and choose one of those supported workout types, there is a small icon with a bell on the bottom-right that you use to turn on Workout Buddy, plus choose any of the alerts it supports for that workout type. There are three voices to choose from, called “Voice 1”, “Voice 2”, or “Voice 3” - on my watch, Voice 1 and Voice 3 were female-sounding voices, Voice 2 is male-sounding, and Voice 1 and Voice 3 have a North American accent while Voice 2 has a non-North American accent. After trying each of them, I preferred Voice 1 myself - Voice 2 and Voice 3 are too cheery for my taste. I don’t know if these voices are the same for every user, though.
- I don’t use pace, cadence, heart rate, power, or time alerts, but I do have 1 mile splits turned on. Workout Buddy almost always summarizes the split when it happens, saying something like, “You’ve just completed mile one. You ran that mile with a pace of eleven minutes and twelve seconds and your heart rate averaged one-hundred eight beats per minute during that mile.” Sometimes it will add a stat like, “and you claimed one-hundred four feet of elevation during that mile.”
- You can mute workout buddy during a workout by swiping right to the screen where you normally would pause or end a workout; there is a new icon in that group to mute workout buddy.
- As time has passed, it is interrupting my workout even less. Sometimes it skips mile interval announcements, sometimes it doesn’t do the initial announcement after you’ve started the workout, and I’ve even had workouts where it skipped the summary announcement at the end, where it tells you total time, distance, etc.
- Sometimes it hallucinates. I’ve had it report incorrect information or stats, such as, “You’ve been running for 50 minutes” and when I glance at the watch it’s actually after 54 minutes. It’s also misreported my current move ring streak.
- Though I have turned it on for indoor cycling workouts, so far it has never said a single thing during a Fitness+ workout. This probably makes sense, as they probably expect me to be listening to the trainer during these workouts.