At the R1 launch event in New York City, Lyu demonstrated an example of having the R1 look at a piece of paper with a spreadsheet printed on it. He asks R1 to swap the two columns and then send the results to his email. I don’t have a paper spreadsheet, but I do have an automated audit report that I want sent to my email. I asked R1 and… it said it didn’t have my email address. (I set up a Rabbit account using my email information.) I asked the company about this and was told that R1 doesn’t yet support documents other than spreadsheets. Great. So I printed a spreadsheet, told it to swap two columns and emailed it and it did the trick. It swaps two columns, but for some reason it doesn’t include some of the other columns on the paper.
I picked up the copy of Kazuo Ishiguro Klara and the Sun and asked R1 if he could look at it and tell me what it was about. Instead, R1 simply described the cover and said it “might” be a work of fiction. If it can read the name, why can’t it simultaneously research it and give me a summary? Even the Humane Ai Pin can do this.
You can also ask R1 to take notes and edit these notes in Rabbithole, but there is no reminder function. I also found it annoying that Rabbithole kept logging me out after a while, so whenever I wanted to check my notes, I might have to log in first. There are also voice recordings, and the R1 plays a nice recorder animation when it’s active. Too bad the recording is low quality and muffled. It do However, summarize the contents of the recording and you can download the WAV file.
The translation, like Humane Ai Pin, is very good. Just ask it to translate a specific language and now you can chat back and forth. R1 will automatically change the translation language so when I speak English it switches to Spanish. When the person across from me speaks Spanish, it switches to English.
Jump there
You know what else does all of this stuff pretty well? Smartphone! This is also a question I get asked many times every time I show someone the R1. “Why can’t it just be an app?”
I ask this question to David Widder, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell Tech working on open source artificial intelligence. “The hardware is great – app developers are increasingly frustrated at having to spend so much money with Apple and Google. I think there’s a bit of a ‘We want to do our own thing and not depend on them’.”
It’s fair to say that the R1 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. One company is charging you $200 to be a beta tester, and while Rabbit has a roadmap of features and services — including a Teach Mode that lets you train the R1 to perform specific tasks possible — then I don’t see a reason to buy it right now. Review it when it has more features and is actually more useful, then buy it if you want.
At least, I didn’t have battery problems like other reviewers. The R1 recharged me quickly and didn’t drain the battery too quickly in standby mode. However, when in use, 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 two phones—that’s why I always insert my personal SIM into every new device I test. Over the past week, I’ve been forcing myself to use the R1 but often end up using my phone. (Oddly enough, the Humane Ai Pin is better in this regard because it’s wearable and I don’t have to put it in my pocket or hold it.)
Rabbit made it clear 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 similar results if not better than R1), then I have no reason to use it. At least it looks nice. I’ll be adding it to my growing collection of AI-powered paperweights.
