Originally published at: Rabbit R1 has 5,000 people using it daily - Boing Boing
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The bleeding edge is always the precursor to the bargain bin.
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Cute logo, did they train the AI on Miffy?
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I’m waiting for some other Teenage Engineering stuff to go cheap second hand thanks!
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My question is: What is this solving/providing that can’t be done with an app?
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I watched my friend struggle with his to get it to do anything useful this summer, but hopefully the software updates have improved its functionality. He was trying to quickly get it to record the audio of a talk we were at but it would not recognize his voice or the commands he was telling it.
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I doubt it; I mean, its stock android running on very cheap phone-hardware. there are limits you can do with updates when its just cobbled together modules on modules, relying massively on an outside server, running a modified chatGPT.
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It seems like the sort of thing you are either using daily or not at all, which means, in other words, 95% of purchasers gave up on it. Charitably there are maybe 6000 or (very charitably) even 7000 users, which doesn’t change the basic fact that 90-something percent thought it was useless. I wonder if it’s a rolling window (where everyone eventually gives up on it, but there are 5000 recent buyers who haven’t, yet), or there’s some core group that actually finds some use in it (even if it’s just as a conversation piece).
Two things: if it was a phone app (that ran on a regular phone, rather than their partial phone hardware), they couldn’t monetize it the same way, and the pointlessness of it would be more obvious.
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More money into the gaping maw of VC.
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What a relief! I expected this post to be about creepy companies data mining sex toys or fancy corkscrews.
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Never say never
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wheres the money coming from? didnt they say services were free after hardware purchase?
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In the movie Her the protagonist had to use a safety pin to help position his phone’s camera in order for his girlfriend app to see what was going on:
This new device eliminates the need for a safety pin.
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At this point the money is coming from the mark-up on the hardware, which is significant (it’s basically part of a cheap phone). Either they’ve been hoping, as has happened, that people will stop using the product before they use enough services to eat into the hardware mark-up profits, or more likely it’s another “AI” product where the plan involves someone initially eating some costs with the expectation that they’d eventually get users hooked enough that they’d be willing to pay the true costs of the services. Though in this case, they have the problem that they can’t get anyone hooked enough in the first place to even use it for no additional costs.
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The other alternative is that users are beta testing this AI service, which they can mine for data and possibly sell. Doesn’t matter if they aren’t paying for a service, they are the product.
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Yeah, there could be that going on as well. And made possible because the whole “AI” industry is apparently almost giving away services to make themselves indispensable so they can start charging the real prices later. Which seems insane to expect companies will fire workers for cheap AI services (that don’t quite work), and continue to pony up when they’re charging about as much as real humans would cost (for something that still doesn’t quite work).
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I got an R1. So far I barely use it. What I really want is something that can be enough of an agent for me that it can unfuck web interfaces; post the same story or picture to Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and my own website, and perform similar cross-site and cross-app flows that I’d like. The Rabbit’s not near there yet.
It did however come with a year’s free subscription to Perplexity AI. And that has definitely won me over. I have it as a separate app on my phone. It searches deeply and well, much better and more quickly than Google. It also shows and links citations, and has no ads by itself. It’s ably dodging clickbait and vapor sites that make pages out of Google queries. It also has the nice option of not sending me 1000s of ads on all platforms for brown shoes if I happen to look up the old show “Tenspeed and Brownshoe”.
I’m very much enjoying using Perplexity, and at $20/mo am likely to continue the subscription. Feeling freed from advertising feels that good.
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