- author, Zoe Kleinman
- role, Technology Editor
I’ve spent the last few days using the Rabbit R1, the latest gadget touted to rival smartphones.
I liked to imagine that this portable, artificial intelligence (AI) digital assistant might one day become as indispensable as my cell phone is today.
The idea behind it is clear: millions of people have played with AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Given their success with software, the next big challenge for tech giants seems to be doing the same with hardware and figuring out how to physically embed AI tools.
Microsoft has done this with its laptops, and Apple is rumored to be following suit with its next iPhone.
But some people are trying to create an entirely new category of gadget, and that’s where the R1 comes in.
Rabbit The company’s new device “An intuitive companion for everyday digital tasks.”
A portable AI-powered assistant that can help you with your daily life and help you get away from your phone and back into the real world… you can see this being a potentially useful gadget.
But the problem is that there are already several similar products on the market, and the reality falls far short of the hype.
Take the Humane Pin, a brooch-like, AI-powered device.
Marques Brownlee, an American tech commentator with 18 million followers on YouTube, captured the mood by describing the product as the worst he has ever reviewed.
The R1 is now on sale in the UK and Europe. Is it going well? His and my review will be provided later.
But first, let’s take a closer look.
Just ask questions
So let’s start with what’s good.
The Rabbit R1 is a fun piece of hardware, with a bright orange rectangle and a big screen that you’ll never lose in your handbag, in an age when nothing is tactile anymore.
It has buttons, a scroll wheel, and a camera that moves from front to back, making a satisfying sound with every movement.
It’s reasonably priced at £159 and requires no subscription.
But what to do with it?
Well, you can basically ask anything you want, it’s pretty limited in other respects at the moment.
There’s no social media, messaging, shopping, health or banking functionality, at least for now. You can sign in to your Spotify or Apple Music accounts, but you’ll need a louder speaker than the one built in.
You can also use Midjourney, an AI image generator, which is random.
The Rabbit R1 was able to tell me the time and weather forecast, give me the right directions to my son’s school (after I told it where I was), and quickly translate conversations from English to German.
When my partner asked who the best chess player was, Alexa took the answer from a list on chess.com and came up with a list of the top 20 chess players for 2024. But it did better than the Amazon Echo in this regard: Alexa chose Garry Kasparov, who retired from competitive chess in 2005.
We asked about some popular conspiracy theories, which we didn’t mention, and when we asked who they thought would win the next UK general election, we got answers from a YouGov poll that day.
Yes, you are good at getting information from the web. But so am I.
Is this a flower?
They showed me a photo of the BBC Scotland building in Glasgow, where I work, but they had a really hard time telling me where to get a coffee.
The first time I asked I was told “Just a moment,” and then it shut down after 112 seconds of silence.
I tried again and this time they delivered pretty quickly, but of the five options listed, two coffee shops were 2.5 miles away, one was closed, and one I couldn’t find on Google at all.
The closest place we could find was 1.3 miles away, but there are actually plenty of options on either side of the building, with two major coffee chains within a few minutes’ walk.
Sometimes the camera helps them describe their surroundings, but often they hallucinate.
She pointed out that the vase of white peonies in my bedroom contained yellow chrysanthemums, and confidently misidentified a plate of poppadoms as tortilla chips.
Image source, BBC/Rabbit Ink
When I pointed the camera at myself, he described me as an “older woman” (deep breath), and when my son made his most dramatic angry face, he described him as a young boy with a “friendly look” (even deeper breath).
I used up over 20% of the battery life in the first hour.
Meanwhile, all your activity is stored in an account in the cloud, called Rabbithole, and cannot be accessed from the device itself.
My Rabbithole (please stop giggling in the background) is currently full of random photos of me and my surroundings, as well as equally random Magic Camera versions of those photos.
The verdict
Ultimately, I concluded that while the device was fun to try out, it still couldn’t do anything that my phone or my eyes could already do, and it was often slow.
And I promised to tell you what Marques Brownlee had to say about the R1. “Almost Unreviewable” was the title of his video about the R1.
The company itself acknowledges that this is a work in progress.
“As a startup, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s all about survival,” said Rabbit founder Jesse Liu.
“In a way, I’m glad we’re getting pushback and doubt right now because it drives us to constantly improve and make a better product.”
And don’t expect the R1’s poor reviews to stop companies from trying to build AI into their hardware.
“We expect to see many more devices in this genre over the next 18 months,” said Ben Wood, a smartphone industry watcher at CCS Insight.
“Still, I believe that in the near future, smartphones will surpass all of these exotic products, but they will feature many of the AI-powered innovations promised in standalone devices.”
That prediction seems like a good one to me.
My phone can do everything the R1 can do and more, and it does it quickly and intuitively.
If anything, this “smartphone killer” just makes the devices it’s trying to compete with even more valuable.