I finally got my hands on the rabbit r1 (the company insists on that prosaic style) that I’ve been writing about since it debuted at CES in January. And I could tell within about 30 seconds of turning it on that it shipped a few months too early — but honestly…is that okay? This AI gadget is weird, relatively cheap, and obviously an experiment. To me, this is something we should rally from, not dive into.
The real problems with the r1 are obvious: it doesn’t have enough app integrations and “could just be an app”.
As for the first problem, it is absolutely true for now. There are only four things to connect to: Uber, DoorDash, Spotify, and Midjourney. Aside from the clearly very small number, these are not useful to me. I don’t take many cars (and often use Lyft). I don’t order a lot of food (DoorDash is a bad company). I don’t use Midjourney (and if I did, I wouldn’t use a voice interface). and I don’t use Spotify (Winamp and Plex if you can believe it). Obviously your mileage may vary, but four isn’t a lot.
As for whether it could just be an app, and for people who are hung up on the idea that it runs on Android or uses some established APIs — maybe you missed the whole point, which is that we already have too many apps and it’s about offload many common tasks and services to a simpler, less distracting device.
I’m clearly not the target audience for this thing. But I’m still the guy who keeps one and I write for a major tech publication, so let’s take it seriously.
Image Credits: rabbit
The simple truth is that I like the idea of the r1 rabbit, and I’m fine with waiting until that idea has had some time to mature. Rabbit is trying to build version 1.0 (though it’s more like 0.1 at this point) of the general-purpose AI assistant that Google, Apple, and Amazon have been pretending for the past decade. Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa… are all just natural language command lines for a collection of APIs. None of them know what to do, so they just back one of the fast horses and hope to catch up at some point. Rabbit said their intention was to move quickly and ship something while the industry’s 900-pound gorillas were flailing.
The problem lies in separating a company’s ambition from its product. Certainly the rabbit device is nowhere near the state that CEO Jesse Lyu showed in various demos and videos. We have very good explanations for this, but it doesn’t change the fact that the r1 ships in a completely bare state.
I cannot in good conscience advise anyone to buy one now. I mean, for me, it does almost nothing. But that hasn’t stopped 100,000 people from buying one and I don’t think they’ve been ripped off in any way. Rabbit has been pretty open about the fact that it will release a minimum viable product as quickly as possible (which, despite the delays, was still pretty fast) and that it will add the features it talked about later.
In the meantime, you’ve got some popular apps to use and a capable conversational AI (which you’d normally have to pay for) that can look things up for you or recognize things in pictures. There are, for example, three settings.
A wealth of options
Here’s how it works — for a limited definition of “work.” Is $200 worth it to you? What if the rabbit added WhatsApp video calling? Will it be worth that $200 when it adds Lyft, Tidal, audio transcription, Airbnb, navigation and Snake? What about next year when you can train it in any app you want? (Assuming the company’s famous Big Action Model works.) I’m not flippant. it’s really just a question of what you think is worth paying.
$200 isn’t nothing, but when it comes to consumer electronics — especially these days of $1,000-plus iPhones — it’s not exactly a big ticket item. People pay $200 for RAM, a smart meter, and nice mechanical keyboards every day. If you told me I could get a Feker 75 Aluminum for $200 right now, I would have ordered two and never regretted it! (If you have, email me!) Meanwhile, you’ll never catch me paying full price for a MacBook Pro. Again, it’s up to each of us to decide. (Though you can wait for a security check as well, considering they’ll have authorized sessions for many of your accounts.)
Personally, I think it’s a fun look at a possible future. My phone is in my bag, but the r1 is in my pocket, and I can take it out on a walk and ask “what kind of hawks and eagles live around here?” instead of opening the Sibley app and filtering by region. Then I can say, “add the peregrine falcon to the list of birds I’ve seen in Simplenote.” Then I can say “call a car in the Golden Gardens car park to take me home and use the cheap option” and it happens. I then ask him to record and identify the song playing by someone’s fire. (Just ask? Not possible in Seattle.) And so on.
Sure, I could do all that on my phone, but I’m tired of holding this thing and switching apps and getting notifications about things that aren’t really important right now.
The r1 rabbit in use. Hand model: Chris Velazco of the Washington Post.
I like the idea of a more focused device. I like that it’s small and safe orange and has a really badass camera with a complicated rotation mechanism for virtually no reason (they make dual camera stacks for this very reason).
Companies were making all kinds of weird stuff. Remember Google’s weird music track for the Nexus Q? Remember how wild smartphones were, with unique keyboards, trackballs, cool materials and weird launchers? Technology is so boring now. People do everything on the same device, and everyone’s device is pretty much the same as everyone else’s.
“What song is that?” Phone comes out, unlock, scan scan press.
“Should we see if we can find a cabin like this for Memorial Day weekend?” Phone, scroll type drag scroll type.
“Who were the two guys at the Postal Service again?” Phone, press type scroll press.
Every day, every thing, same handful of actions. It’s useful, but it’s boring. And it’s been the same for years! Phones are where laptops were in 2007, and smartphones came to let us know there’s another way to do it. Rabbit hopes to do the same thing to a lesser extent with r1.
I love that the r1 exists and that it’s both amazingly futuristic and hilariously limited. Technology should be fun and weird sometimes. Efficiency and reliability are overrated. Plus let me tell you the homebrew and hacking community will go to town on this thing. I can’t wait until I play Tempest on it or, frankly, scroll down in a social media app or reader. Why not? Technology is what we make of it. The r1 leans into that, and I think it’s cool.
