CES 2024: Rabbit r1 AI Assistant Wants to Do Tasks for You

[Lounge vibes 05]

Siri+ incoming. Pay more to get access to LLM enhancements! Also, will be available to Apple One customers … (year later) Apple One price increase by $5/month, Starting Feb 2026!

I don’t think (at least during this year) that Apple will try to make customers pay for AI experiences.
There’s a fundamental distrust of AI from the public at the moment, and if any company can put a positive spin on it, and actually show users how it can improve their lives, it would be Apple.
And as soon as they put it behind a pay wall, all that trust is gone.
It’s not a streaming service like Apple TV or Apple Music.

 

[attila]

Without watching the keynote, but still reading from the description here, I have absolutely no idea of what this thing does, what goes onto the screen, or how it interacts with my apps?

 

[AshGuy]

This looks dumb.

Did anybody else audibly eyeroll when he spent all that time trying to convince everyone how secure it was going to be. You heard me. Audible eyeroll. That's a kid that doesn't even know how much of a nightmare he's getting himself and his customers into right there.

 

[5232152]

Most people are not going to replace their phones with this.

Speak for yourself. This is what the future I am looking for where I (and others) don't have to sit with phones and scroll aimlessly to do simple things such as looking up a phone number, scrolling instagram/tiktok and all that other stuff. This gets the job done properly.

 

[5232152]

Why do companies always give same lame tasks as examples? Order a pizza, hail a rideshare.. yawn.....

That's like 0.001% of things I would like automated.

Be aware of your own tech bias. The things you want automated won't make this consumer logical for the mass market they are trying to appeal to.

 

[5232152]

Without watching the keynote, but still reading from the description here, I have absolutely no idea of what this thing does, what goes onto the screen, or how it interacts with my apps?

Maybe all those answers would be explained if you actually saw the keynote?
Hint: It does.

 

[Timo_Existencia]

Why does it pronounce C as a K? Ko for Co and Killian for Cillian....

Because Cillian Murphey IS pronounced Killian Murphy.

 

[Timo_Existencia]

I like the idea. Why hardware? He's pitching the idea that AI can essentially replace apps. So, creating another app would defeat the idea. A cool concept. And Apple should have been down this road already. They've had Siri long enough to have gone down this road. But, as we all know, Apple doesn't usually producer first to market, just best to market.

 

[jclardy]

I'm 100% the target for this. I want the future, the price is right, and no subscriptions? Hell yeah. But it just didn't do enough that my already-guaranteed to have device, my phone, does via the ChatGPT action button. I don't want push to talk tbh – I want always ready to listen to me and maybe even proactive responses and awareness, not just reactive. Their learning UI and such was the most impressive part and even that may be clunky in practice because your 'action' is borked with any one Discord update, Midjourney command change, etc. Good on them, though! Hardware is hard.

My guess on the pricing is either they are VC funded and have no business model setup yet, or they want to be the ultimate user data collection service since they can get access to anything you give them access to.

They obviously want a ton of users so that their integration library grows, but I am curious how flexible their action model is, IE if Travelocity changes the text of the "Buy" button to "Continue" does it need to be retrained by a user? Or does it semantically know that they are equivalent? I'm also curious how it extracts the images and formats them for its lower res display, is that all manually configured for each service?

The main issue is that what they are doing with the camera and speech to text is not being run on the crappy hardware inside this thing...so their server costs are going to be huge if users actually use the device. Maybe they are just counting on them becoming cheaper over time.

 

[flottenheimer]

Looks like a red Playdate.

… Which was also designed by Teenage Engineering.

Love their aesthetic.

 

[sparkinstx]

Processor	Custom AI chip
Operating System	Rabbit OS
RAM	8 GB
Storage	128 GB
Display	3.5-inch touchscreen
Dimensions	45 x 25 x 7 mm
Weight	127.5 g
Battery	All-day battery life (exact duration not specified

Edit : from other source :

• Display: 2.88-inch touchscreen
• Buttons: Push-to-talk, scroll wheel
• Camera: AI-enhanced, motorized rotating camera
• Processor: MediaTek Helio P35, 2.3 GHz
• Memory: 4 GB
• Storage: 128 GB
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, cellular (unlocked SIM slot)
• Ports: USB-C
• Weight: 115 grams
• Color: Luminous Orange
• Battery: All-day usage
• Operating System: rabbit OS
• Price: $199 (pre-sale), no monthly subscription
• Availability: U.S. shipping late March, global shipping later this year

Dimensions

45 x 25 x 7 mm

It looks square, so how can it be 45 x 25? 45 x 45 sounds more like it.

 

[flottenheimer]

This kind of interface is definitely going to be a natural part of the future. And at this price point I am very tempted to order and try it out.

Rabbits general thinking and overall approach feels just about right. (Over the years the screen will become bigger - and it will replace our phones though).

 

[Le0M]

... Apple will most likely have AI Siri only be avail be on iPhones 16 and beyond

Definitely not. Like Chatgpt and alike, they run over the internet. No need for a fast processor. Would be quite stupid to limit it to iPhone 16, cuz there would be no reason, really. It would just make many people angry.

 

[sparkinstx]

I go to their homepage (in both Edge, and Chrome), and instead of a picture of the device, there's a placeholder. If they can't even get Web design right, what's their product going to be like? 🤦‍♂️

 

[Timo_Existencia]

I go to their homepage (in both Edge, and Chrome), and instead of a picture of the device, there's a placeholder. If they can't even get Web design right, what's their product going to be like? 🤦‍♂️

View attachment 2334911

Worked fine for me.

 

[MNWildFan]

Man, this sounds like basically what Siri should have been YEARS ago

It's frustrating to no end when Apple touts certain functions of Siri like being able to book rides with Uber and Lyft, but the purpose of it is immediately defeated when it comes back with saying that you'll need to continue in the app

 

[satchmo]

This is the kind of innovation sorely missing from Apple.

Instead we get improvements to an iPhone camera and titanium finishing. It's nice, but hardly outside the box thinking.

 

[Razorpit]

Tech for dummies. So instead of teaching people how to do something, now they have to learn how to use this thing, so it can watch them not use their phone properly, and replicate it? If something like an iPhone is that difficult to use, then maybe it needs to have a user manual in each box. Remember user manuals? I wonder if rabbit comes with one.

“Shortcuts” enters the room and stands shoulder to shoulder in a unified front with Siri. 😂

I’m not saying this is the answer, but the iOS is slowly becoming a mitigated disaster. Just about every time I want to change a setting in the phone it requires an internet search. Nothing works like I think it should work, and settings are not where I think settings should be.

Additional hardware is not a solution to this problem. Better Siri, better navigation, better design, is the answer. That’s all on Apple’s shoulders.

 

[Graphikos]

Anyone else bothered by the "plus" mouth on the rabbit?? Just me? Ok.

 

[Graphikos]

I go to their homepage (in both Edge, and Chrome), and instead of a picture of the device, there's a placeholder. If they can't even get Web design right, what's their product going to be like? 🤦‍♂️

View attachment 2334911

Works for me. Maybe a temp issue or ddos-like demand?

 

[seggy]

I'm 100% the target for this. I want the future, the price is right, and no subscriptions? Hell yeah. But it just didn't do enough that my already-guaranteed to have device, my phone, does via the ChatGPT action button. I don't want push to talk tbh – I want always ready to listen to me and maybe even proactive responses and awareness, not just reactive. Their learning UI and such was the most impressive part and even that may be clunky in practice because your 'action' is borked with any one Discord update, Midjourney command change, etc. Good on them, though! Hardware is hard.

If the concept catches on, watch Apple steamroller it as usual - with AI Shortcuts in three years max.

I'm assuming the Rabbit management are already shopping it around to be acquired, so they never need to worry about whether that no subcription bit becomes a problem for them down the line - they can just leave every buyer high and dry when whichever party bought them shuts down the service and they cash out, with a very sincere tweet of apology of course.

 

[tomtad]

This is the kind of innovation sorely missing from Apple.

Instead we get improvements to an iPhone camera and titanium finishing. It's nice, but hardly outside the box thinking.

I'm hoping when Tim Cook clears off and we get some much needed new leadership at Apple we'll get a skunkworks division, maybe even with a spinoff brand, that can pursue low volume but bleeding edge things like this which then can be fed into the mainstream Apple products.

 

[mrothroc]

They obviously want a ton of users so that their integration library grows, but I am curious how flexible their action model is, IE if Travelocity changes the text of the "Buy" button to "Continue" does it need to be retrained by a user? Or does it semantically know that they are equivalent? I'm also curious how it extracts the images and formats them for its lower res display, is that all manually configured for each service?

It is unlikely that it will need to be retrained for something like this. There are several multimodal LLMs that you can show a picture with text. In this case, you could show it a grab of the website, with the text "What do I click to continue?". (Some of the more sophisticated versions I've heard about also provide the DOM, so the AI can give the ID of the element to be clicked.)

You can see how this approach could be generalized to any website that humans can understand, so it won't need to be manually configured for each service.

 

[applesith]

Speak for yourself. This is what the future I am looking for where I (and others) don't have to sit with phones and scroll aimlessly to do simple things such as looking up a phone number, scrolling instagram/tiktok and all that other stuff. This gets the job done properly.

Do you like the R1 for the simple interface and form factor? Would you use this instead of a smartphone?

 

[name99]

Why have another device to carry around? Most people are not going to replace their phones with this. Apple and Google could "easily" update their assistants to work across multiple apps to accomplish the same result within existing hardware/ecosystem and be more seamless like not having to use a computer to email, authenticate etc.

Pretty much exactly.
I look at this and the only question I have is "Why is this not an app?"