I spent a day on it Rabbit R1, and to say I was underwhelmed would be an understatement. In fact, I was surprised at how little it offers at the moment, and even given what it does offer, what a poor job it does at it. According to CEO Jesse Lyu, it is R1 is “the worst this technology will ever be,” which is the nature of the technology, but isn’t a good selling point – especially when you’re asking $200 for it. If I had to rationalize my thoughts on this device, these would be the 10 things that left me largely unimpressed.
1. It’s half-baked at best
This was the most common Complaint about the R1 So far: It’s an unfinished, half-baked device. You get a bunch of extremely simple AI chatbot-like features, and all the exciting things are promised for later this year. This includes learning R1 actions that can be generalized to different applications, as well as a learning mode that allows users to create personalized agents to handle specific tasks.
The company has been transparent about this and the CEO admits that the device is “at a very early stage.” Considering that we have to pay full price for an incomplete product, this is far from ideal.
At the moment, the R1 doesn’t offer anything close to value worth its price. It’s ridiculous to pay this amount for a device that only shows the weather and plays a song. It’s obvious that we’re just Rabbit’s guinea pigs testing their debut product for them.
2. A very strange app menu
There are four apps you can use out of the box on the R1: Spotify, Uber, DoorDash, and Midjourney. I wasn’t impressed with the app selection since I use Lyft and Uber Eats for my rides and food deliveries. My colleague Kyle uses Seamless to order food and he wasn’t particularly happy with the app menu either. I also find the inclusion of Midjourney pointless and a very arbitrary attempt to make the device as AI-heavy as possible.
3. Too many mistakes
Perhaps I would have forgiven the R1 for its limited app menu (considering more options are reportedly on the way) if the apps had at least worked. Uber got both my pickup and drop-off locations completely wrong the first time, but worked on the second try. For something like a ride-hailing service, I wouldn’t want to trust a product with a 50% success rate. And if I need to double check the R1 to see if it did everything right, I might as well use my phone for that task.
The overall goal of this gadget is to “save time” and minimize typing on your phone by “eliminating the need to navigate through multiple apps.” But with the current number of glitches and the things it hallucinates out of nowhere, it’s actually a waste of time.
Spotify was a complete mess. Sometimes it acknowledged my command to play a particular song, but still didn’t play anything, and often ignored my repeated requests to stop playback. It kept mixing up the names of songs and artists and played Josh Levine when I asked about Avril Lavigne.
The biggest disappointment was that my personal Spotify account wasn’t recognized at all, even though I was logged in through Rabbithole. I asked it to play a song from my playlist titled “Paki” and it randomly started playing Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Song with the word “Pakistan”.
4. Miserably average vision function
The Rabbit Eye-enabled Vision feature is pretty basic anyway. You point the camera at something and the R1 can tell you what it is. It’s a feature we’ve had on Google Lens for years. However, it was also average at best. Some questions were asked completely incorrectly and other answers were very vague.
It confidently labeled my colleague’s black shirt “red”. The answer to another question wasn’t wrong, just so vague that it became unusable. he expected an exact name for a shoe brand.
5. Mediocre translation function
The R1 allows bi-directional translation between an impressive number of languages, but I wouldn’t trust its translation capabilities in a situation where I would do it Strictly speaking need them. They are unreliable and often inaccurate. It ran quite well with Urdu and Arabic, but there was a lot of stuttering with Hindi. Again, Google Translate is available and it’s free, so I wasn’t impressed by the R1’s mediocre translation capabilities.
6. Poor location services
I should have guessed that this device had no idea where I was when I asked for a weather update and gave me the weather report for Anaheim, California (I’m in Manhattan). It worked out in the end, but I could have spent half that time checking the weather app on my phone.
Even though the R1 has GPS services, when asked, it got my zip code completely wrong. I corrected it and apologized for the error, but still recommended a Starbucks in Indiana when I asked for the closest one.
7. Disconnections with RabbitOS
Due to an inexplicable connection loss with RabbitOS, I was often asked to wait after a request. The R1 would take a while, tell me it was working to reconnect, and then come back to my request. This could be fixed with the next software update, but it is quite annoying.
8. Incredibly short battery life
The 1,000mAh battery of this device lasts about five to six hours and it takes an hour to charge. Even with the recent software update that slightly improved idle battery performance, I don’t see this device as something that could be my all-day pocket companion. At that time it was down 6% Only two and a half hours in standby mode.
9. Your SIM service is the subscription fee
The people at Rabbit made sure to repeat this multiple times as opposed to the AI pinThere is no monthly subscription fee for the R1. However, you still need cell service (along with Wi-Fi) to operate. So technically you still pay a monthly fee to use this device. The monthly cost for the AI Pin is $24, and purchasing another phone line for the R1 will cost you about the same.
10. Not as contextually intelligent as advertised
The Demo video showed Rabbit’s CEO asking the R1 to play a song, then asking it to play “another song from the same album.” The device’s memory and ability to understand context were the main capabilities marketed here. I’ve tried the exact same prompts countless times. Not even one attempt managed to get everything right. Half the time it would play a completely random song, and on other occasions it would ask me what album I was talking about.