This year’s CES was inundated with AI-powered products, but also by personal assistant products. From AI-powered bird feeders to AI grills that continually learn to help improve the ideal cooking level, AI was everywhere. The personal assistant space saw a number of physical embodiments of AI. Samsung revived their assistant they presented in 2020, Ballie, which has now become a roaming assistant with a projector built-in. LG revealed its latest AI Agent, designed to patrol around your home to help where it can. But perhaps the most intriguing was Rabbit’s r1 device.
Appearing out of nowhere at CES 2024, the Rabbit r1 was one of the biggest surprises revealed at the annual convention in Las Vegas. The device was so popular after the keynote reveal, that within 48 hours, Rabbit had sold out of its first two production runs, each run producing 10,000 units. For the possibilities that the r1 offers, the price of just $199 USD makes for a low entry point for a device that is challenging the big mobile phone providers like Apple and Samsung.
The Rabbit r1 is a small square orange device, around half the size of a mobile phone, and appears to be a simple handheld device. The truth, however, is that the tech inside indicates a product that could change the way people engage with apps and an insight into the future of mobile phones. The r1 is essentially a personal assistant, powered by AI to streamline and bring things together in one interface. It does this by understanding natural language requests through its ChatGPT-style large language model. But what makes the r1 stand apart is its breakthrough innovation called the Large Action Model. From here, the r1 is able to access all the apps it has been given access to, and seamlessly works between apps to deliver what has been requested.
Unlike other AI assistants, the r1 can take complex requests, break it down into a variety of tasks, and complete them all together. This removes the need for individual apps for a user to jump between, essentially removing the need for apps. While the proliferation of apps on mobile devices has made life easier, there are now so many apps to constantly switch between, user interfaces across mobile devices have become cluttered and difficult to interact with. Rabbit promises to change this, removing apps to create one app/space to do everything.
Firstly users would need to authenticate the apps they want Rabbit to access. Once this is done, the r1 will be able to interact with the apps using ‘rabbits’, AI agents that can interact with the apps in the background whenever a user prompts the r1 for anything. These rabbits will go through and interact with the app, pulling in relevant information, and can even purchase on behalf of the user if the user confirms they are happy to proceed.
Rabbit r1 can respond to voice prompts 10 times faster than other voice assistants, such as Siri and Alexa. In action, a user can ask the r1 to organize an Uber, or multiple Uber, for a group of people. It could then order food off DoorDash, for the food to arrive at the same location that the Uber would be heading to. This can all be done with one voice prompt asking r1 to organize everything. But the real showcase was asking the r1 to fully plan out a trip to London, including recommended flights and accommodation, in which a user can select which options they want, then r1 can then purchase tickets and accommodation. It’s even possible for it to design an itinerary for the holiday.
AI continues to improve and streamline life, but it has predominantly been siloed into certain components. The likes of ChatGPT and Bard pull from internet searches but are mainly meant for research and suggestions, less about taking further action off the back of results. AI agents are an emerging trend that is designed to start taking action, but the technology has yet to evolve to a point where these agents can conduct anything at the same level as a human, until now. Rabbit appears to be able to interact with a multitude of apps that people have become reliant on.
With delivery of the first two runs of the r1 expected to ship in March, time will tell if this device lives up to what has been shown off so far. But this is an intriguing proposition, and one that could reshape how we interact with the world. Due to the development of their Large Action Models, Rabbit insisted that their product is something that would not be possible in a mobile phone. Samsung has just unveiled their Galaxy AI-infused devices and it will be interesting to see how the influence of Rabbit’s offering may shape the device space in 2024.