Developed by a startup called Rabbit, the R1 is a little AI-powered pocket-sized device that might eventually be able to replace your smartphone. The squarish gadget features a 2.88-inch LCD touchscreen alongside a rotating camera for capturing photos and videos that can roll back and forth.
You also get a clickable scroll wheel that lets you navigate around the user interface and talk to the R1’s built-in voice assistant. Designed in collaboration with Teenage Engineering, the device looks like a half-flip phone but instead of apps, takes a Humane AI Pin-like approach by letting users control the device using voice commands.
The device also packs two microphones and a speaker. Similar to Humane AI Pin, you can interact with the Rabbit R1 by pressing and holding the ‘Push-to-talk’ button that initiates the built-in voice assistant and lets you ask anything you want to know about instead of having to use an app. While Rabbit boasts that the R1 has an ‘all day’ battery, like Humane, it did not share any details about its capacity.
In a video demo, company CEO Jesse Lyu says that the Rabbit R1 is powered by an in-house developed operating system called RabbitOS that uses a ‘Large Action Model’ instead of a large language model like ChatGPT. He says that they wanted to “find a universal solution that can trigger services” regardless of what platform or app the people are using.
This puts it more in line with voice assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa which can send messages, call contacts and do other actions on your behalf. Instead of using APIs, Rabbit says the R1 uses a training model that can be used on top of existing apps. The company claims that its Large Action Model was trained using human interaction with apps like Spotify and Uber to make it understand what the settings button looks like, how to check if an order was confirmed and remember where the navigation buttons were.
It also comes with a training mode where users will be able to teach the device how to do something. “You’ll be like, ‘Hey, first of all, go to a software called Photoshop. Open it. Grab your photos here. Make a lasso on the watermark and click click click click. This is how you remove watermark”, says Lyu. Once you teach the model how to do something, it will then be able to perform it on its own. He adds that the R1 will be able to answer any queries within 500 milliseconds.
But how any of this works remains to be seen. As for logging in to apps like Amazon and Spotify, users will be able to connect all their services to the device via the Rabbit Hole web portal. It can also make audio and video calls and comes with a SIM card slot.
Story continues below this ad
Rabbit R1 is currently available for preorder for $199 and will start shipping sometime in March or April. And no, it doesn’t require any subscription.
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
