Hardware maker Rabbit has partnered with ElevenLabs to bring voice commands to its devices. Rabbit is set to ship the first set of r1 devices next month after garnering a lot of attention at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year.
The Rabbit r1 will launch with ElevenLabs’ technology, which will enable voice commands from users and how the pocket AI device communicates with them. At launch, the feature will only be available in English with one voice option. ElevenLabs said that while the r1 was ready for voice interaction from the start, the company’s low-latency models will make interactions more human.
“We’re working with the rabbit to bring the future of human-device interaction closer. Our partnership is to make r1 a truly dynamic co-pilot,” ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski said in a prepared statement.
In January, Rabbit said it would use Perplexity AI solutions to answer user questions on the device.
Earlier this week, Rabbit said its first batch The $199 r1s will leave the factory by March 31st, and will reach users within a few weeks. The company said users will be able to interact with chatbots, get answers from Perplexity, use two-way translation, order rides and food, and play music from the device instantly.
The company’s CEO Jesse Lyu said earlier this month at a StrictlyVC event that the rabbit is close to having 100,000 device orders.
Earlier this year, ElevenLabs raised $80 million in Series B from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and entrepreneur Daniel Gross to reach unicorn status. The company has focused on providing voice cloning services for creating audiobooks, dubbing movies and TV shows, commercials, and video game characters. Most recently, Indian audio platform PocketFM, which raised $103 million from Lightspeed, said it is using ElevenLabs’ services to enable creators to turn their writing into audio series.
But ElevenLabs has faced its fair share of criticism with users trying to cheat a bank’s authentication system4chan users they imitate celebritiesand journalists documenting this it’s easy to set up voice clones to create problematic content. The startup has developed a tool to detect speech generated by its platform and is also working on a tool to detect synthetic audio and distribute it to third parties.
