At the R1 launch event in New York, Lyu demonstrated an example of the R1 presenting a paper with a spreadsheet printed on it. He asked R1 to swap two columns, then send the result to his email. I didn’t have a paper spreadsheet, but I did have a self-inspection report that I wanted to email. I asked R1 and… he told me he didn’t have my email address. (I set up my Rabbit account with my email information.) I asked the company about this and was told that the R1 doesn’t yet support documents other than spreadsheets. Great. So I printed out a spreadsheet, asked him to swap two columns, and emailed it, and that’s kind of what he did. He swapped the two columns, but for some reason he didn’t include several other columns that were on the paper.
I picked up my copy of Kazuo Ishiguro Klara and the sun and I asked R1 if he could look at it and tell me what it was. The R1 simply described the cover and said it was “probably” a work of fiction. If he could read the name out loud, why couldn’t he look it up at the same time and give me a summary? Even the Humane Ai Pin could do it.
You can also have the R1 take notes and edit those notes in the Rabbithole, but there’s no recall functionality. I also find it annoying that Rabbithole keeps logging me out after a while, so every time I want to check a note I might have to log in first. There are also voice recordings, and the R1 plays a nice tape recorder animation when working. Too bad the recording itself is poor quality and muffled. He do However, summarize the contents of the recording and you can download the WAV file.
The translation capabilities, much like the Humane Ai Pin, are good. Just ask it to translate a specific language and you can now have a back and forth conversation. The R1 will automatically change the translation language, so when I speak English it changes it to Spanish. When the person in front of me speaks Spanish, they switch to English.
Hop to her
You know what else does all of this quite well? Smartphones! This is also the question I get repeatedly every time I show the R1 to someone. “Why can’t this just be an app? »
I asked this question to David Widder, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell Tech who studies open source artificial intelligence. “Hardware is cool: app developers are increasingly frustrated at having to give so much money to Apple and Google. I think there’s a little bit of, “We want to do our own thing and not be beholden to them.”
That’s fair, but the R1 just isn’t ready yet. I considered skipping this review and writing a more experiential story, but this is a product that anyone can buy right now. A company charges you $200 to become its beta tester, and while Rabbit has a roadmap of features and services, including a learning mode that lets you train the R1 to perform specific tasks, I see no reason to buy it now. Revisit it when it’s more feature-rich and genuinely useful, and buy it then if you want.
At the very least, I haven’t had any battery issues that affect other reviewers. The R1 charged quickly for me and didn’t drain too quickly in standby mode. However, when you use it, the battery drains quite quickly.
Ultimately, the biggest problem is that I now have to carry two devices. I’m WIRED’s resident smartphone reviewer and I hate carrying around two phones. That’s why I always put my personal SIM card in every new device I test. Over the past week, I’ve been forcing myself to use the R1, but often ended up using my phone instead. (Oddly, the Humane Ai Pin was better in this regard, because it’s portable and I don’t need to carry it in a pocket or hold it.)
Rabbit was clear in saying that the R1 won’t replace your phone, but if I can do all the same tasks and more on my smartphone (Google’s Gemini gave me the same if not better results than the R1), I have no reason to use it. At least it’s pretty. I’ll be adding it to my growing collection of AI-powered clipboards.
