At the R1 launch event in New York City, Lyu demonstrated an example where the R1 looks at a paper with a spreadsheet printed on it. He asked R1 to swap two columns and 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 send to my email. I asked R1 and… he said he didn’t have my email address. (I set up my Rabbit account with my email information.) I asked the company about this and they told me that the R1 did not yet support documents other than spreadsheets. Excellent. So I printed a spreadsheet, asked it to swap two columns, emailed it, and it more or less did this. 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 about. Instead, R1 simply described the cover and said it is “probably” a work of fiction. If you could read the name, why couldn’t you research it at the same time and give me a synopsis? Even the Humane Ai Pin could do this.
You can also have the R1 take notes and edit them in Rabbithole, but there’s no reminder function. I also find it annoying that Rabbithole keeps logging out after a while, so every time I want to review a note, I may have to log in first. There are also voice recordings and the R1 plays a nice recorder animation when it’s working. Too bad the recording itself is low quality and muffled. He does However, summarize the content of the recording and you can download the WAV file.
The translation capabilities, like those of the Humane Ai Pin, are good. Simply ask it to translate a specific language and now you can 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, he switches to English.
Jump towards it
You know what else all of this does quite well? Smart phones! This is also the question I get repeatedly every time I show someone the R1. “Why can’t it just be an app?”
I asked this question to David Widder, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell Tech studying open source artificial intelligence. “The hardware is great: App developers are increasingly frustrated with 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 isn’t ready yet. I considered skipping this review and writing a more experiential story, but this is a product anyone can buy right now. One company is charging you $200 to be their beta tester, and while Rabbit has a roadmap of features and services, including a teaching mode that lets you train the R1 to perform specific tasks, I don’t see a reason to buy it now. Revisit it when it has more features and is really useful, and buy it then if you want.
At the very least, I haven’t had the battery issues that plague other reviewers. The R1 recharged quickly and doesn’t drain power too quickly in standby mode. However, when you use it, the battery drains pretty quickly.
In the end, the biggest problem comes down to the fact that I now have to carry two devices. I’m WIRED’s resident smartphone reviewer and I hate carrying two phones; That’s why I always put my personal SIM in every new device I try. Over the past week, I forced myself to use the R1, but often ended up using my phone. (Interestingly, the Humane Ai Pin was better in this regard, since it is wearable and I don’t have to carry it in my pocket or hold it.)
Rabbit was clear in saying that the R1 won’t replace your phone, but if I can do the same tasks and more on my smartphone (Google’s Gemini has given me identical, if not better, results than the R1), I have no reason to use it. At least it looks pretty. I’ll be adding it to my growing collection of AI-powered paperweights.