Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to Zwift this autumn, in the form of personalised recommendations for indoor rides and workouts.
With autumn on the horizon, Zwift has announced the latest round of updates to the popular indoor cycling app.
While the new AI tool is said to help “take out the cognitive load of figuring out what to do” on Zwift, there’s also a new world expansion, a new set of controllers, updates to racing categorisations and anti-cheat tools, and much more.
For an in-depth look at the new controllers, check out our Zwift Click v2 first look. Otherwise, read on for the lowdown on everything new coming to Zwift this season.
- New Zwift Click controllers make upgrading to virtual shifting cheaper than ever
- Zwift: your complete guide
Less time choosing, more time riding
According to Zwift, a big friction point for newer riders is working out what to do when they load up the app.
With so many routes, group rides, events, races and workouts available, the amount of choice can be overwhelming.
With its new AI tool, Zwift will offer personalised recommendations to riders at the top of the app homepage, with a suggested ride designed to account for your goals, preferences and current training load.
Rather than simply suggesting structured workouts every time, Zwift says its AI tool will recommend “a mix of routes, workouts, Robopacer rides & events allowing Zwifters to maintain variety“.
Riders will also be able to “tune” the recommendations around variables such as time, activity type, structure and more.
According to Zwift, the new AI tool is designed to help you “get fitter faster” and has been enabled by a recent update that allowed riders to track and gain experience points (XP) from outdoor rides, among other things.
The brand says its AI tool can leverage this data to gain a better understanding of a rider’s current fitness level and training loads, helping to improve its own recommendations.
Zwift says the tool is set to launch in November, and while it won’t offer ‘training periodisation’ at launch, the brand said it hopes to expand the tool’s capabilities in the future.
This update launches alongside updates to the ‘progress report’ that shows at the end of activities.
Upon finishing a ride, Zwift will display an in-depth summary of key metrics and information, including fitness score and goal progression, training status, level progress, racing score changes and so on.
Zwift also says its ‘goals’ feature – which is based on weekly riding goals riders can set for themselves – will now be able to update automatically to encourage continuous improvement.
At launch, Zwift says the auto-adjusting goals feature will be relatively simple, but that it has “big visions” for how it can be improved in the future.
The big apple is getting bigger
In its “largest map expansion in years”, Zwift is updating its iconic New York world with 31km of new virtual roads towards the end of October.
The expansion will include 16 new rideable routes (plus four for runners), taking riders out of the map’s futuristic Central Park area and to Prospect Park via the subway network.
While the original Central Park area has a few short, sharp climbs, Zwift says the Prospect Park expansion will feature “fast rolling roads” and iconic New York locations such as the Brooklyn Bridge.
Zwift also says it's adding what it calls 'power segments' to the New York subway, which encourage riders to go for personal bests over short durations, from 5-30 seconds.
The goal with power segments is to set the highest average power possible, with efforts being recorded on in-game leaderboards.
Zwift says it intends the segments to be “primarily a challenge of personal achievement”, and so will display results compared to your previous efforts over the past 90 days, with community leaderboards following afterwards.
The brand says power segments will “roll out to other Zwift Worlds over time”.
Making Zwift racing fairer and more competitive
Zwift racing has exploded in popularity in recent years, helping riders get their competitive fix from the comfort of their own home/shed.
From this month, Zwift says it is introducing a range of new features designed to make racing fairer and more competitive.
For a start, Zwift Racing Score now features ‘score decay’.
Designed for racers who haven't competed in the previous 30 days, this will update your racing score – the measure used to categorise riders within events – based on your most recent personal bests.
Event organisers will also gain the option to categorise riders according to their 30-day best score, rather than only their current score.
The idea is to help a rider’s racing scores better reflect their current fitness levels, reward strong performances and help keep races fair and competitive.
According to Zwift, racing on its platform is now 64 per cent “closer” year-on-year – meaning the gap between the top and bottom finishers in each race is now significantly smaller than before.
The goal, Zwift says, is to make it so that “anybody of any ability can hop in and find a race they are competitive in”.
Beyond this, Zwift says it’s also “rolling out new anti-botting detection”, to detect suspicious activity on the platform, and combat cheating, bots and XP farming.
Accounts “flagged” by these tools will move “through our standard enforcement pipeline”, but the brand says this “is laying the groundwork for a new generation of anti-cheating technology”.
Brompton World Championships come to Zwift
In terms of events, there are a whole host of challenges to take on this season.
Replacing the Tour of Watopia, a new double-XP event series called ‘Zwift Unlocked’ is coming to the platform from 6 October to 16 November.
As well as helping riders level up faster, Zwift Unlocked will feature 10 new routes across multiple Zwift roads.
Zwift Unlocked events will be available as both group rides and races, with options for short and long distances.
Beyond that, there’s the usual Zwift Racing League, zRacing, Zwift Games and thousands of community events.
And if that wasn’t enough, the virtual Brompton World Championships are coming to Zwift this November.
As the name suggests, this event sees riders all aboard the British brand’s iconic folding bike, with an additional twist of everyone wearing a tweed outfit.
Zwift says riders can unlock the tweed outfit for their avatar simply by participating in a Brompton World Championships event, and can permanently unlock the Brompton folding bike via the Drop Shop.
