Recenzja Rabbit R1: niedokończony, nieprzydatny gadżet AI

“You’re holding a taco.”

My Rabbit R1 told me that the another day. I was sitting at a table at a cafe on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and I had just picked up this $199 orange rectangle of a gadget and pointed it at the food in my hand. With unwavering, absolute confidence, the R1 told me it was a taco.

It was a Dorito. A Cool Ranch Dorito, to be specific. I’d shown the R1 the bag just a fewer seconds earlier and asked about the calories. (The R1 got that bit right.) I moved the chip around and tried again — inactive taco. I could not convince this AI-powered gadget, theoretically at the cutting edge of a technological revolution, that I was holding a chip.

Over and over in my investigating of the R1, I’ve run into moments like the taco encounter, where the full thing just feels broken. It misidentified a red dog toy as a stress ball, then as a tomato, then as a red bell pepper that it assured me is totally safe to eat. I’d start playing a song on the R1, and then the device would halt responding but keep playing so that I couldn’t even pause it or turn the volume down.

For a while, the R1 couldn’t even tell the time or the weather. Rabbit yet fixed that with a software update on Tuesday, and the company promised many more updates to come — though now, alternatively of the weather being incorrect by thousands of miles, it gives me the weather from about 15 miles away. I guess that counts for something.

Ever since the R1 debuted at CES, with a keynote filled with large promises and awesome demos, this device has been sold as a super-clever, ultra-helpful AI assistant. alternatively than just answer ChatGPT-style questions, it was expected to do just about everything your telephone can do, only faster. A fewer months later, this device on my desk bears no resemblance to the 1 we were told about, that more than 100,000 people preordered based on promises and demos.

After reviewing the Humane AI Pin and uncovering it woefully incapable to execute its ambition, I was excited about the R1. It’s cheaper, more whimsical, and little ambitious. After utilizing the R1, I feel like Humane at least deserves credit for trying. The R1 is underwhelming, underpowered, and undercooked. It can’t do much of anything. It doesn’t really know what a taco looks like.

The most intriguing tech in the R1 is what Rabbit calls the “Large Action Model,” or LAM. Where a large language model, or LLM, is all about analyzing and creating text, the LAM is expected to be about doing stuff. The model learns how an app works in order to be able to navigate it on your behalf. In a LAM-powered world, you’d usage Photoshop just by saying “remove that woman from the background” or make a spreadsheet by telling your device to pull the last six quarters of earnings from the investor website.

There is fundamentally no evidence of a LAM at work in the R1. The device only presently connects to 4 apps: Uber, DoorDash, Midjourney, and Spotify. You connect to them by beginning up Rabbit’s web app, called Rabbithole, and logging in to each service individually. erstwhile you go to do so, Rabbit opens up a virtual browser inside the app and logs you in straight — you’re not logging in to a service provided by DoorDash but alternatively virtually in to DoorDash’s website while Rabbit snoops on the process. Rabbit says it protects your credentials, but the process just feels icky and insecure.

I logged in to them all anyway, for journalism. but for Midjourney, which I never managed to get into due to the fact that I couldn’t get past the CAPTCHA systems that evidently thought I was a bot. The connection doesn’t do much anyway: the R1 won’t show you the images or even send them to you. It’s just typing an image prompt and pressing enter.

I’d love to tell you how Uber and DoorDash work better erstwhile you’re logged in, but I never got either 1 to successfully do anything. all time I pressed that side button on the R1 — which activates the microphone — and asked it to order food, it spat back a informing about how “DoorDash may take a while to burden on RabbitOS” and then, a second later, told me there was an issue and to effort again. (If you gotta include that disclaimer, you most likely haven’t finished your product.) Same thing for Uber — though I was occasionally able to at least get to the point where I said my starting and ending addresses loudly and in full before it failed. So far, Rabbit has gotten me zero rides and zero meals.

Spotify was the integration I was most curious in. I’ve utilized Spotify forever and was eager to effort a dedicated device for listening to music and podcasts. I connected my Bluetooth headphones and dove in, but the Spotify connection is so hilariously inept that I gave up almost immediately. If I ask for circumstantial songs or to just play songs by an artist, it mostly succeeds — though I do frequently get lullaby instrumental versions, covers, or another weirdness. erstwhile I say, “Play my Discover Weekly playlist,” it plays “Can You Discover?” by Discovery, which is seemingly a song and band that exists but is definitely not what I’m looking for. erstwhile I ask for the Armchair Expert podcast, it plays “How Far I’ll Go” from the Moana soundtrack. Sometimes it plays a song called “Armchair Expert,” by the artist Voltorb.

Not only is this incorrect — it’s actually dumber than I expected. If you go to Spotify and search “Discover Weekly” or “Armchair Expert,” the correct results show up first. So even if all Rabbit was doing was searching the app and clicking play for me — which is totally possible without AI and works large through the off-the-shelf automation software Rabbit is utilizing for part of the process — it should inactive land on the right thing. The R1 mostly whiffs.

About a 3rd of the time, I’ll ask the R1 to play something, it’ll pop up with a cheery confirmation — ”Getting the music going now!” — and then nothing will happen. This happened in my investigating across all of the R1’s features and reminded me quite a few the Humane AI Pin. You say something, and it thinks, thinks, thinks, and fails. No reason given. No sound letting you know. Just back to the bouncing logo homescreen as if everything’s A-okay.

The long and short of it is this: all the coolest, most ambitious, most interesting, and differentiating things about the R1 don’t work. They mostly don’t even exist. erstwhile I first got a demo of the device at CES, founder and CEO Jesse Lyu blamed the Wi-Fi for the fact that his R1 couldn’t do most of the things he’d just said it could do. Now I think the Wi-Fi might have been fine.

Without the LAM, what you’re left with in the R1 is simply a voice assistant in a box. The smartest thing Rabbit did with the R1 was work with Perplexity, the AI search engine, so that the R1 can deliver more or little real-time information about news, sports scores, and more. If you view the R1 as a dedicated Perplexity machine, it’s not bad! Though Perplexity is inactive incorrect a lot. erstwhile I asked whether the Celtics were playing 1 night, the R1 said no, the next game isn’t until April 29th — which was true, but that it was already the evening of April 29th and the game was well underway. Like with Humane, Rabbit is making a bet on AI systems all the way down, and until all those systems get better, no of them will work very well.

For basic things, the kinds of trivia and information you’d ask ChatGPT, the R1 does as well as anything else — which is to say, not that well. Sometimes it’s right, and sometimes it’s wrong. Sometimes it’s fast — at its best, it’s noticeably faster than the AI Pin — but sometimes it’s slow, or it just fails entirely. It’s helpful that the R1 has both a talker and a screen, so you can perceive to any responses and see others, and I liked being able to say “save that as a note” after a peculiarly long diatribe and have the full thing dumped into the Rabbithole. There’s a useful note-taking and investigation device somewhere inside the R1, I suspect.

To that point, actually: my single favourite feature of the R1 is its voice recorder. You just press the button and say, “Start the voice recorder,” and it records your audio, summarizes it with AI, and dumps it into the Rabbithole. $200 is beautiful steep for a voice recorder, but the R1’s mic is great, and I’ve been utilizing it a bunch to evidence to-do lists, diary entries, and the like.

The most enjoyable time I spent with the R1 was moving around the National Mall in Washington, DC, pointing the R1’s camera at a bunch of landmarks and asking it for information via the imagination feature. It did beautiful well knowing which large president was which, erstwhile memorials were built, that kind of thing. You could almost usage it as an AI tour guide. But if you’re pointing the camera at anything another than a globally known, constantly photographed structure, the results are all over the place. Sometimes, I would hold up a can of beer, and it would tell me it was Bud Light; another times, it would tell me it’s just a colorful can. If I held up a can of shaving cream, it identified it correctly; if I covered the Barbasol logo, it identified it as deodorant or “sensitive skin spray,” whatever that is. It could never tell me how much things cost and whether they had good reviews or aid me buy them. Sometimes, it became really, truly convinced my Dorito was a taco.

For the first fewer days of my testing, the battery life was truly disastrous. I’d kill the thing in an hr of use, and it would go from full to dead in six hours of sitting untouched on my desk. This week’s update improved the standby battery life substantially, but I can inactive fundamentally watch the numbers tick down as I play music or ask questions. This’ll die way before your telephone does.

Just for fun, let’s ratchet the R1’s ambitions all the way down. Past “The Future of Computing,” past “Cool Device for ChatGPT,” and even past “Useful For Any intent At All.” It’s not even a gadget anymore, just a $200 desk ornament slash fidget toy. In that light, there is something decidedly different — and almost delightful — about the R1. A rectangle 3 inches tall and wide by a half-inch deep, its plastic body feels smooth and good in my hand. The orange colour is loud and bold and stands out in the sea of black and white gadgets. The plasticky case picks up fingerprints easily, but I truly like the way it looks.

I besides like the combination of features here. The press-to-talk button is simply a good thing, giving you a physical way to know erstwhile it’s listening. The screen / talker combo is the right 1 due to the fact that sometimes I want to hear the temperature and, another times, I want to see the forecast. I even like that the R1 has a scroll wheel, which is utterly superfluous but fun to mess around with.

As I’ve been investigating the R1, I’ve been trying to decide whether Humane’s approach or Rabbit’s has a better chance as AI improves. (Right now, it’s easy: don’t buy either one.) In the close term, I’d most likely bet on Rabbit — Humane’s wearable and screen-free approach is so much more ambitious, and solving its thermal issues and interface challenges will be tricky. Rabbit is so much simpler an thought that it ought to be simpler to improve.

But where Humane is trying to build an entirely fresh category and is building adequate features to possibly actually 1 day be a primary device, Rabbit is on an inevitable collision course with your smartphone. You know, the other handheld device in your pocket that is practically guaranteed to get a giant infusion of AI this year? The AI Pin is simply a wearable trying to keep your hands out of your pockets and your eyes off a screen. The R1 is just a worse and little functional version of your smartphone — as any folks have discovered, the device is fundamentally just an Android telephone with a customized launcher and only 1 app, and there’s nothing about the device itself that makes it worth grabbing over your phone.

Lyu and the Rabbit squad have been saying since the beginning that this is only the very beginning of the Rabbit journey and that they know there’s quite a few work left to do both for the R1 and for the AI manufacture as a whole. They’ve besides been saying that the only way for things to get better is for people to usage the products, which makes the R1 sound like an intentional bait-and-switch to get thousands of people to pay money to beta-test a product. That feels cruel. And $199 for this thing feels like a waste of money.

AI is moving fast, so possibly in six months, all these gadgets will be large and I’ll tell you to go buy them. But I’m rapidly moving out of hope for that and for the full thought of dedicated AI hardware. I fishy we’re likely to see a slew of fresh ideas about how to interact with the AI on your phone, whether it’s headphones with better microphones or smartwatches that can show you the readout from ChatGPT. The Meta Smart Glasses are doing a truly good occupation of extending your smartphone’s capabilities with fresh inputs and outputs, and I hope we see more devices like that. But until the hardware, software, and AI all get better and more differentiated, I just don’t think we’re getting better than smartphones. The AI gadget revolution might not stand a chance. The Rabbit R1 certain doesn’t.

Photography by David Pierce / The Verge