I don’t know if you’ve experimented with chat bots much, but they’re starting to pop-up in a lot of places. Several websites have chat bots that immediately try to interact with the user and there are a lot of chat bots available via Facebook Messenger. If you haven’t explored them at all, I’ve got a fun one for you to look into!

Jolt is a bot that can encourage you to be more active in your regular life. You can type in the activity that you do and Jolt will award you MovePoints. Jolt will help you come up with a goal and place you in a group to get started. Then each new week Jolt will analyze your performance and recommend you move up or down into different goal-level groups based on how you did.

You can also connect common fitness trackers and eliminate the need to manually enter your activities. Then you can just interact with Jolt as it encourages you and tells you funny jokes. I have an Apple Watch and found it easy to connect my HealthKit data.

Then you just start interacting… Jolt will periodically check in with you to let you know how you’re doing or to encourage you when you complete a workout. Once you’ve completed a week, then you’ll see leaderboards of how you’re stacking up against others in your group.

 

Sometimes, if you’re lucky enough to top the leaderboard and Jolt is feeling fun, you get a new nickname. I was called “Jill the Reigning Champ” for a couple of weeks, which was kind of fun. I’m curious if there are other titles or accolades to be heaped upon you at different times. That would be fun.

It can be annoying at times too… mainly when you’re having an off week and Jolt reminds you that you’re falling behind. I got sick and couldn’t change my MovePoints goal for the week. But it’s also good that you can’t change your goal really easily, it would make it too easy to bail out.

MovePoints are their own point system, since calories can have a negative connotation and not everyone needs to or wants to be counting calories as a metric. Plus some people do intense HIIT workouts that don’t take as much time as a long slow run. You can’t make time doing a workout the metric either. So coming up with their own value just made sense.

They have teams being used in gym/personal training environments. I love the idea of having this kind of format back when I coached running groups. It would be great to get everyone on board in one team and let them cheer each other on via Jolt.

Take a listen to my interview with the CEO to learn more about their goals and plans for Jolt, more about the MovePoint metric and how they’re hoping to expand. And then go sign up for Jolt… it’s fun to play around with it and it’s not a huge time commitment.