Amazon has made its Halo fitness tracker, which listens to your voice to gauge your mood through voice and scans your body to measure body fat data, available for anyone to buy.
The company’s debut wrist-based wearable was unveiled back in August and was initially made available through an early access period that offered the tracker at a cut-price $64.99 along with six months of its Halo membership.
Essential reading:Best fitness tracker to buy right now
Now anyone with access to Amazon US can wear a Halo with the price jumping up to its regular $99 price with Halo membership costing $3.99 a month.
Available in small, medium and larges size options, the Android and iOS-friendly fitness band comes in a range of different fabric band looks. It also works with a range of additional sport and fabric bands, with prices sitting around the $19.99 mark.
As a reminder, the Halo packs hardware like an accelerometer motion sensor, a heart rate monitor and a temperature sensor. There’s no display to let you glance at your stats during the day and it promises a battery life of up to seven days.
Without signing up to the Halo membership service, users will get access to some pretty standard fitness tracking features, including the ability to track steps, monitor sleep and heart rate data.
When you’re ready to pay up, there’s a whole lot more going on. You have the ability to measure your body fat percentage or BMI with the promise of more accurate readings than what you’d get stepping onto a set of smart scales.
The other big feature, and one that gives it that creep factor, is Tone.
This uses the onboard microphones that along with machine learning, will analyse positivity and energy in the user’s voice to coach you to having more positive interactions with with your family or other people you’re regularly in conversation with.
If you do not like this idea of Amazon listening and analysing the tone in your voice, you can opt out of Tone and turn those microphones off.
The last element of the Halo experience is Labs, which Amazon says are science-backed challenges, workouts and experiments that users will have access to.
The likes of Weight Watchers, audio-based workout app Aaptiv, Headspace and Lifesum will be among the companies to offer some of those Labs experiences.
Data privacy will understandably be a major concern for considering strapping on the Halo, which is able to collect quite a rich array of your health, fitness and even voice information.
With the Tone feature, data is done locally and not stored. Amazon also states you can download or delete your data at anytime and that it won’t sell your health data or let anyone view it without your permission.
The wider rollout of Halo follows news that Amazon’s Echo Frames smartglasses have also gone on sale after only being available through its beta testing access.
It’s not such good news for Echo Loop, Amazon’s first attempt at making a smart ring, which looks to have been ditched as a concept at least for now.
If you want in on Halo, you can head to the dedicated page on Amazon.com now.
We’ll have a review up soon to let you know if it’s worth putting on the Halo.
