Rabbit r1 Revisited

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Now including seasonal artwork.

You might remember the fuss last year when the Rabbit R1 went to market missing lots of features. I bought one, egged on by a good review that turned out to be a tad optimistic. It still doesn’t do lots of the things that were promised, but I don’t really care. I always regarded the “Large Action Model” stuff as a bit far fetched. The idea that a device could ever infer from a web site exactly what to do struck me as very unlikely, and I thought that the idea of letting something loose with all the passwords and authentication it would need to be able to act on my behalf would be a deeply silly thing to do. But I liked the colour and the form factor. And it has neat tricks. It answers questions well and I really like the “Magic Camera” which you can use to get an interesting twist on shots that you take.

This is what it thinks the cable release device looks like inisde…

If there is a prize for software development teams (and there hardly ever is) I’d give a special award to the folks behind the Rabbit R1. They were set an impossible goal at the start but they’ve kept plugging away adding loads of features and fixed lots of things:

  • The user interface now makes a lot more sense.

  • The battery life is OK. You can get through a day as long as you don’t get carried away.

  • You can view your pictures on the device. Say “Show me my pictures” and you get to see all your recent shots.

  • The Large Action Model is still mostly a work of science fiction, and I really wouldn’t trust it with anything important, but you can have fun playing with it and sort-of-automating interactions with the web.

  • You can change how the user interface looks and the voice it uses. This is huge fun.

  • There is now multi-language support.

  • Interactions with your rabbit earn you carrots you can spend in an “r-cade” where you can pick up costumes and add-ons.

I like having the Rabbit with me and especially like taking pictures with the camera. People enjoy seeing what the Rabbit thinks they look like (unless it’s an old fisherman when you really aren’t one).

I hope that Rabblt keeps going. I’d even be happy to pay a monthly subscription to retain access to the things it does. Lots of things have AI baked into them alongside everything else, but I much prefer having a device that just does this one thing. And I still like the colour.