Jesse Lyu, the CEO of an AI startup called Rabbit introduced the Rabbit R1 at CES 2024. The R1 is an innovation of a personal assistant powered by AI, which serves as a user-friendly apparatus for smartphones.
The Rabbit R1
In essence, it’s a more versatile version of Alexa, Siri, etc. It uses a push-to-talk, voice-controlled interface and a 360-degree camera to understand tasks as given by its user. But what makes it stand out?
The Rabbit R1’s key features:
- Rabbit OS: Their software is built with Large Action Model (LAM) technology. Similar to Large Language Models (LLM), the Rabbit R1 can understand and respond to complex natural language requests with better agency than its known counterparts (ChatGPT, Google Assistant, etc.)
- Voice-controlled interface: The Rabbit R1 promotes simplicity, so to lessen tapping and swiping–you can control everything on the device with your voice alone. Simply ask the Rabbit R1 to play music, order food, or book a flight if you need it to.
- 360-degree camera: Apart from typical camera functions–Rabbit says you can teach the R1 new skills. This device’s camera aids that ability as its used for object recognition and scene understanding.
- Simplified design: The Rabbit R1 has a clean and minimal design, with a 2.88-inch touchscreen (half an iPhone) and a bright orange body. It’s small and lightweight, making it easy to carry around.
However, Rabbit doesn’t desire for the R1 to replace your smartphone–they intend for their device to work with it. The R1 is limited in a sense where it can’t browse YouTube, let you view your social media feed, or organize your emails for you.
So for now, smartphones will still be with us as one of our day-to-day tools for our routines. With more specifics about the Rabbit R1’s usage potential remaining unclear, it stands as one of the most exciting developments of AI this year.
While people within the US may pre-order the next batch of Rabbit R1’s for for $199, we’ve yet to see if this will be available internationally in the future. We’ll keep you posted once we have more information about this new development from Rabbit.
