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Do you hate apps? Jesse Lyu hates apps. At least, that was my takeaway after my first chat with the founder of Rabbit Inc., a new AI startup debuting a pocket-friendly device called the R1 at CES 2024. Instead of taking out your smartphone to complete some task, hunting for the right app, and then tapping around inside it, Lyu wants us to just ask the R1 via a push-to-talk button. Then a series of automated scripts called “rabbits” will carry out the task so you can go about your day.
The R1 is a red-orange, squarish device about the size of a stack of Post-It notes. It was designed in collaboration with the Swedish firm Teenage Engineering. (Lyu is on TE's board of directors.) The R1 has a 2.88-inch touchscreen on the left side, and there's an analog scroll wheel to the right of it. Above the scroll wheel is a camera that can rotate 360 degrees. It's called the “Rabbit Eye”—when it’s not in use, the camera faces up or down, a de facto privacy shutter—and you can employ it as a selfie or rear camera. While you can use the Rabbit Eye for video calls, it’s not meant to be used like a traditional smartphone camera; more on this later.
On the right edge is a push-to-talk button you press and hold to give the R1 voice commands, and there’s a 4G LTE SIM card slot for constant connectivity, meaning it doesn’t need to pair with any other device. (You can also connect the R1 to a Wi-Fi network.) It has a USB-C port for charging, and Rabbit claims it’ll last “all day” on a charge.
The R1 costs $199, though you’ll have to factor in the cost of a monthly cellular connectivity bill too, and you have to set that up yourself. Preorders start today, and it ships in late March.
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This pocket-friendly device is by no means meant to replace your smartphone. You’re not going to be able to use it to watch movies or play games. Instead, it’s meant to take menial tasks off your hands. Lyu compared it to the act of passing your phone off to a personal assistant to complete a task. For example, it can call an Uber for you. Just press and hold the push-to-talk button and say, “Get me an Uber to the Empire State Building.” The R1 will take a few seconds to parse out your request, then it'll display cards on the screen showing your fare and other details, then request the ride. This process is the same across a variety of categories, whether you want to make a reservation at a restaurant, book an airline ticket, add a song to your Spotify playlist, and so on.
The trick is that the R1 doesn’t have any onboard apps. It also doesn’t connect to any apps' APIs—application programming interfaces, the software gateways that cloud services use for data requests. There are no plug-ins and no proxy accounts. And again, it doesn't pair with your smartphone.
Rabbit OS instead acts as a layer where you can toggle on access for select apps via a web portal. Lyu showed me a web page called the Rabbit Hole with several links to log into your accounts on services like OpenTable, Uber, Spotify, Doordash, and Amazon. Tap on one of these and you’ll be asked to sign in, essentially granting Rabbit OS the ability to perform actions on the connected account on your behalf.
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That sounds like a privacy nightmare, but Rabbit Inc. claims it doesn’t store any user credentials of third-party services. Also, all of the authentication happens on the third-party service’s login systems, and you’re free to unlink Rabbit OS’s access at any time and delete any stored data. In the same vein, since the R1 uses a push-to-talk button—like a walkie-talkie—to trigger the voice command prompt, there's no wake word, so the R1 doesn't have to constantly listen to you the way most popular voice assistants do. The microphone on the device only activates and records audio when you hit that button.
The backend uses a combination of large language models to understand your intent (powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT) and large action models developed by Rabbit Inc., which will carry out your requests. These LAMs learn by demonstration—they observe how a human performs a task via a mobile, desktop, or cloud interface, and then replicate that task on their own. The company has trained up several actions for the most popular apps, and Rabbit's capabilities will grow over time.
We're all used to talking to our devices by now, asking voice assistants like Siri or Google Assistant to send a text or turn up the Daft Punk. But Rabbit does things differently. In the company's press materials, it notes that Rabbit OS is made to handle not just tasks but “errands,” which are by nature more complex and require real-time interactions to take place. Some examples the company offers are researching travel itineraries and booking the best option for your schedule and budget, or adding items to a virtual grocery store cart and then completing all the necessary steps to check out and pay.
Arguably the most interesting feature of LAMs in the R1 is an experimental “teach mode,” which will arrive via an update at a later date. Simply point the R1’s camera at your desktop screen or phone and perform a task you’d want the R1 to learn—Lyu’s example was removing a watermark in Adobe Photoshop. (Hooray, stealing copyrighted images!) You’re essentially training your own “rabbits” to learn how you do niche tasks you’d rather automate. Once your rabbits learn the task, you can then press the button and ask your R1 to do something you alone have taught it.
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Lyu also says his team taught a rabbit how to survive in the video game Diablo IV, demonstrating all the ways to kill enemies and keep the health bar topped up. Theoretically, you can ask a rabbit to create a character and level it up so that you don’t have to grind in the game.
There are a growing number of devices vying to be your personal AI companion. Unlike the Humane AI Pin, however, the R1 isn’t meant to just be a tool for accessing the world’s information more easily. The Rabbit team wants the device to become the way you interface with the digital world.
“We’re trying to solve your problem,” Lyu says. “We’re trying to give you a tool so intuitive that you already know how to use it without learning how to use it.”
