TL;DR
- The Rabbit R1 is a handheld device that uses AI to learn how you use apps and then simplifies the process for you.
- It’s powered by a MediaTek processor, has a push-to-talk button, a 360-degree rotatable camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even a 4G SIM slot.
- The device costs $199 and is now available on pre-sale.
At CES 2024, AI has been everywhere. From smart home devices to smartphones, robots to televisions, cars to computers — everyone wants a piece of the AI pie. Enter Rabbit Inc., an AI startup based out of Santa Monica that has launched a pocket-sized mobile device called the Rabbit R1.
The R1 is a standalone handheld device driven by natural language. It has a touch screen, a push-to-talk button, an analog scroll wheel, a microphone for voice commands, speakers for response, and a Computer Vision-enabled 360-degree rotational camera called the Rabbit Eye. It works on a MediaTek Helio P35 processor and has 4GB RAM, 128GB storage, a USB-C port, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and a 4G-enabled SIM card slot. So what does it do exactly?
The demo on the startup’s website shows it best, but essentially, the R1 comes with a Large Action Model (LAM)-based operating system called Rabbit OS. It helps the device navigate all your apps and helps you use them more quickly than you would on a standard smartphone. The company claims its foundational model can learn user intention and behavior when they use specific apps and then mimic them reliably and quickly.
For instance, you can link Spotify with the R1 to not only play music using voice commands, but you can also ask the AI to perform contextual tasks like playing other songs from the same album. You can ask R1 to tell you who wrote the lyrics of the song, who composed the music, who sampled the song, and more. It’s like talking to ChatGPT, but the company claims R1’s responses are much faster.
For linked apps like Uber, you can ask the R1 to book you a ride from your office to your home, and it will complete the task in a single step compared to the multiple steps you would otherwise take to book a cab on your own through a smartphone app. You can even give commands like “find me an Uber that can fit me and my six friends,” and the R1 will book an UberXL instead of a regular Uber.
“Rabbit is now building towards an intuitive app-free experience with the power of AI. Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, showed the possibility of understanding natural language with AI; our Large Action Model takes it one step further: it doesn’t just generate text in response to human input – it generates actions on behalf of users to help us get things done,” said Rabbit Founder and CEO
Jesse Lyu.
The Rabbit R1 is now available for pre-sale at a price of $199. Orders will start shipping in the US in March. At launch, the R1 will be trained to work with the most popular apps. Going forward, it will also get an experimental capability that lets users train their own “Rabbits” to perform specific tasks on niche apps and workflows.
