Rabbit r1 Revisited

/

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.

Taking a Rabbit to the Formula E Finals

/

this is about the best I could do on the day. Turns out that racing cars are hard to photograph

Formula E is a bit like Formula 1, except that the cars are powered by electricity and sound a bit like turbocharged hair driers. We went to the final event of the season in London today. We watched the practice, the qualifier and finally the race. In between these we wandered around looking at stands in the exhibition attached to the race, watched a mini-concert from Craig David and generally had an all-out wonderful time. I took a camera and the Rabbit R1.

I took a bunch of pictures with a proper camera, and lots with the Rabbit R1. I was lucky because for some reason we had good mobile phone connections and the Rabbit was able to take the shots and do “Magic Camera” type things with them. I really like the results. They are not photographs in the proper sense of the word, but they provide a lovely record of the event and I’m very pleased to have them. And if you bear in mind that a Rabbit R1 is a fraction of the price of a new camera lens I reckon it is a good investment if you want a quirky record of what you’ve been up to.

This is what the rabbit thought of the race

Some of the racing got quite intimate

A “Rabbit’s Eye View” of one of the cars on display

The Racers

Yes, there was a Costa

Tyre smoke at the start

From now on I’m going to be taking the Rabbit R1 with me to get its unique perspective.

Rabbit r1 Magic Camera

/

Just found something that the Rabbit R1 can do which is really rather awesome. You can take a picture with it and shortly afterwards a “Rabbit Magic Camera” version appears in your Rabbit Hole site.

This is what it did to my picture. Perhaps I should grow a moustache

Apparently this is my desk

.. and this is my audio mixer, which I think looks awesome

The Rabbit is not perfect. But I think it is definitely growing on me..

Rob and the Rabbit R1

/

It is impossible to overstate how orange this thing is

I mentioned to number one daughter that I’d got a Rabbit R1. “But aren’t those supposed to be useless” she replied. Well yes. And no. She wasn’t surprised that I’d got one. All it took was one vaguely positive review a while back to get me to whip out my credit card. And I do have a record of buying doomed devices, Nabaztag Rabbit, Chumby, Berg Little Printer, Windows Phone. And I had just got paid. For the same outlay I could have bought a few meals out, a not very good golf club or three or four video games. But I got a gadget instead. Big surprise.

It arrived yesterday. Well packaged and presented. No power supply, just a snappy little box. And it works (as in it does the few things that it is supposed to do). You can ask it questions and it will give you useful replies most of the time. It now has the ability to control Apple Music, but having seen stories about how badly protected the internal software is, I’m not going near it with my Apple credentials any time soon. And anyway my phone has a better speaker. One thing I do really like is the “tell me what you can see” feature.

Mostly right

I pointed the Rabbit at Hull MakerSpace last night at the meetup (which was great fun by the way) and it came up with the above description, which I think is about right (although it is not really that messy). Holding a conversation is fun and context is maintained very well. I’ve not tried getting it to do something, but if they ever release a way of creating your own scripts and whatnot (and they are scripts - I don’t think the Large Action Model is really a thing just yet) then I’ll be tempted to have a go.

I’m not sure how much I’ll use my Rabbit, although it is nice to have something you can just ask a question any time. If I was using my phone or computer I’d have to stop what I was doing, find the appropriate application and enter the question. And then I’d forget what I asked and have to ask it again. With the Rabbit you get a RabbitHole web page that gives you a lovely time sequence of questions and answers which you can go back through.

I guess my biggest concern is whether the Rabbit will still be here in a year’s time. It was sold as a device that gives you free access to a high quality large language model and it does that in a responsive and useable way. But that model is not sustainable in the long run. All of the devices that I mentioned at the top (with the exception of Windows Phone) failed because they used backend servers that needed to be paid for.

I’d be happy to pay a subscription for my Rabbit (or better yet roll that subscription into what I’m already paying for ChatGPT). However, I don’t think enough of the other Rabbit users will be happy to do that. So unless someone with deep pockets and a long term eye for market share steps in I’m afraid that in a while my Rabbit will in a box in the loft alongside all the other next big things up there. But I’m enjoying it for now. It’s an interesting signpost on the road to where we are all headed.