The Rabbit R1 can fit in the palm of your hand and will be able to answer questions, launch a Spotify playlist or call a taxi with the push of a button. Sounds familiar, right? The Rabbit R1 isn’t a smartphone in the traditional sense. Instead, it promises to be a dedicated personal assistant powered by AI, and it ships in late March for $199.
Our phones are great at many things, like snapping vacation photos, entertaining us with an endless stream of bite-sized videos and acting as our personal planners. That’s exactly the problem, according to Jesse Lyu, founder and CEO of AI tech startup Rabbit. He thinks the myriad apps and functions available on our phones have stripped away their simplicity, and he’s trying to change that with the R1, which debuted at CES 2024.
The Rabbit R1 is roughly half the size of an iPhone 15.
The R1 physically shares some similarities with smartphones, such as a touchscreen display and a camera, but those parts are put to use in different ways.
The Rabbit R1 will be able to use apps on your behalf.
The R1 doesn’t have apps in the traditional sense, but it connects to services to carry out requests. Playing a playlist on Spotify or calling an Uber requires you to link those apps to your Rabbit account through an online portal. That could end up being a cumbersome process, considering you’d have to manually connect any service you’d want Rabbit to factor into your usage. Rabbit says it doesn’t store any login data and that authentication methods happen on the app’s system.
The device uses Rabbit’s proprietary large action model to execute tasks, along with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to understand your spoken requests. During my brief time trying it, I asked the Rabbit R1 to play music and answer basic knowledge-based questions. The ears on the animated rabbit icon shown on the screen adorably perked up when I held the side button to recite my command. I’ll need to spend more time with it before knowing how well it works as a personal assistant for getting things done more quickly and efficiently than my phone.
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With the R1, Rabbit is taking on an ambitious goal by trying to carve out a place for a new gadget in our lives in a world that’s already overrun with screens and sensors. It’s interesting nonetheless to see new hardware developed in response to the increased interest in AI we’ve seen over the past year. Still, Rabbit’s software experience has to be compelling enough to convince you to buy a new device rather than continue to use ChatGPT, Google Bard and other AI helpers on the devices you already own.
For more, check out what’s next beyond the smartphone and the most exciting mobile tech we saw at CES.
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