Rabbit R1 puts a tiny AI assistant in your pocket for $199

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We are living in the age of AI, and CES has always been the go-to place to check out the most weird and conceptual devices the modern tech world has to offer. 

So, enter Rabbit Inc., an AI startup based out of Santa Monica that has launched a pocket-sized mobile device called the Rabbit R1, threatening the yet to retail Humane AI Pin.

What is Rabbit R1? 

The R1 from Rabbit is a natural language-driven standalone device sporting a touch screen. 

It also has 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. 

Behind the scenes, we have a MediaTek Helio P35 processor powering the device, paired with 4GB RAM, 128GB storage, a USB-C port, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and a 4G-enabled SIM card slot. 

The design has been made in collaboration with Teenage Engineering, the same firm that helped with the design on Nothing phones, which is why you may find the Rabbit R1 a bit familiar.

While the specs list looks decent, the question remains – what does it do exactly? 

The demo on the startup’s website shows it best. You can also watch the demo below. 

Based on the video, the Rabbit OS runs the R1, a Large Action Model (LAM)-based operating system.

The OS helps you navigate your apps and use them even quicker than your standard smartphone. However, only a few popular apps seem to be supported at the moment.

According to the company, the device’s foundational model is capable of learning user intention and behavior when using specific apps and then mimicking them reliably and quickly.

For example, you can link Spotify with the R1. You can not only play your favorite music with just a voice command, but you can also ask the AI to perform contextual tasks like playing other songs from the same album. 

In addition, you can ask R1 to tell you who wrote the song’s lyrics, the composer’s name, and more. 

It’s like you are talking to ChatGPT, but the company says R1 responds faster. According to the Rabbit Founder and CEO Jesse Lyu,

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.

Rabbit R1 price and availability

The Rabbit R1 is now available for pre-sale at $199. In the US, the R1 order will start shipping in March. The company says it won’t need a subscription, unlike the Humane AI Pin.

The AI will also be trained at launch to work with only the most popular applications. However, in the future, the device will get an experimental capability that will enable users to train their own “Rabbits” to work with specific applications and tasks. 

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