Late last week Amazon announced Halo, an AI-powered health service. In doing so it beat Apple to exactly what Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly told us the company was focusing on over 18 months ago.

Oh, and Amazon wants your underwear selfies.

Plus, recordings of everything you say.

Amazon launched Halo and the Halo Band, which is like an Apple Watch without the watch or the screen. Less is both less and more here, with less meaning much longer battery life (up to a week) and fewer distractions — no notifications — and less also meaning no screen. So, no watch, no timer, no music, no podcasts, no weather, no calendar, no other apps period that people use their smartwatches for. Halo band has an optical sensor for detecting your heart rate and probably much more information over time, an accelerometer to sense when you’re moving, a temperature sensor, and a button.

The button is for turning the on-board microphones off, which when enabled listen to your voice to detect signs of stress. Turning those on reduces battery life to two days.

The underwear selfies are for your body fat calculations, and you take those via the accompanying smartphone app.

Most people, of course, will be worried about privacy with a device and service that wants semi-intimate photos and, if you choose, always-on microphones, but Amazon says it’s all private.

“Your speech samples are deleted automatically after being processed so no one ever hears them,” Amazon says. “Your Body Composition images are processed in the cloud then automatically deleted so no one but you ever sees them.”

The truly interesting thing from a clash of the tech titans perspective is that Amazon is not selling a gadget here. Rather, Amazon is selling a service — specifically, a subscription service. (Yes, precisely the kind of thing that Apple has repeatedly said over the past few years that it is focusing on.) The intelligence, appropriately enough for the leading cloud company, isn’t on your wrist. It’s in AWS, or Amazon Web Services. That’s where the process of your health data, the processing of your audio recordings, and the processing of your underwear selfies happens.

The critical ingredient: artificial intelligence.

“First, a deep neural network (DNN) identifies your body and separates it from the background with pixel-level accuracy,” Amazon says. “This network is trained on hundreds of thousands of images to recognize the body in the photo, regardless of what else is in the camera’s view (pets, furniture, shadows, etc.). Next, the information is analyzed by another DNN to understand the relationship between images of a person and the physical properties of their body, including body shape and distribution of fat and muscle … the shape and appearance of your body in the images is analyzed by a third DNN to generate your 3D body model.”

Body fat percentage is notorious hard to accurately measure. Amazon says this method is nearly twice as accurate as leading home scales, which typically pass a tiny electric current through your body and map out impedance (fat and muscle react differently) to generate an estimated percentage. Amazon says its photography and AI method is “as accurate as methods a doctor would use.”

To achieve, that, of course, you need to take the selfies while wearing “tight, minimal clothing” and trust Amazon’s security and privacy.

For that privilege, and everything else the Halo service offers, you’ll pay about $4/month. The initial band itself is $64.99, which comes with six months of service free. Both are “early access” prices and may rise when the price is in full commercialization mode.

This is something we might expect from Apple.

After all, Apple CEO Tim Cook told us over a year ago that Apple’s greatest contribution to history will be in the field of health. The company’s Apple Watch is an industry leader and has been around for more than six years, having launched in September of 2014. And for several years Apple has been focusing on subscription services as it tries to transition off hardware-heavy revenue to more repeatable, scalable, and lucrative services.

Apple has TV+. It has News+. Apple Arcade. Apple Music. iCloud storage. The iPhone upgrade program, which is a monthly fee to always have the latest gear. And, of course, AppleCare.

But it doesn’t have a health service. It doesn’t have a standard way for me to report health data from my Apple Watch to a doctor or health service. It doesn’t have a health AI monitoring my Apple Watch data, comparing it with others in a privacy-safe way, and warning me about long-term health indicators. It’s not pairing me up with nearby people who might want to engage in healthful activities near me. It’s not offering to help me monitor my food intake and tell me what nutrients I’m missing or what components I’m getting too much of. It’s not giving me progress reports on body composition trends. It’s not telling me when I’m showing signs of increased stress over time. In short, it’s not doing anything monetizable on top of the original Apple Watch purchase price.

Now, there’s a lot that’s good about that.

Owners get a ton of value out of their Apple Watches, and there’s regular media stories about people whose lives have been saved by their Apple Watch thanks to fall detection or other technologies. And, there’s a huge amount of value in buying a health sensor that reminds you to stand, work out, get fit … and doesn’t always ping you for extra dollars.

But there’s no doubt that Amazon has beaten Apple to the punch in delivering a health service. It’s preliminary, it’s not hugely impressive, and it’s limited. But it’s a start.

Apple: the ball is in your court.