Through this year's exhibition, it can be seen that mobile phones, home appliances, PCs, cars, and more are fully embracing AI, with hardware featuring AI functionalities gradually becoming the center of attention. Many innovative devices have caught everyone's interest.
For example, a startup company, Rabbit, unveiled its handheld AI hardware product – Rabbit R1 at CES 2024, priced at $199. Within 24 hours of its release, it sold 10,000 units, far exceeding their expectations.
As a handheld AI device, Rabbit R1 adopts a design with an orange square, weighing only 115g, making it very compact and lightweight, easily fitting into a pocket.
It features a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a rotatable camera for shooting, an interactive scroll wheel, and a microphone. Equipped with a 2.3GHz MediaTek processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage space, the claimed battery life is up to a whole day. In addition to supporting Bluetooth and WiFi, it has a SIM card slot, providing users with mobile network connectivity.
The device runs on Rabbit's independently developed operating system, RabbitOS. Unlike large language models like ChatGPT, it is based on a Large Action Model, enabling AI to learn how humans operate various apps.
By combining it with a large language model, users can issue commands, and AI assists in execution. R1 doesn't adopt the traditional API support approach but trains the model on how to use existing applications. It also has a built-in translation system that automatically detects the language in the environment and provides bidirectional translation, eliminating the last communication barrier between people.
Rabbit R1 does not need to be paired with a phone during use, and it does not have built-in apps. It can help users with various daily tasks such as playing music, ordering meals, and calling a taxi. Users can even train it to learn how to operate specific applications.
Users only need to hold the interactive scroll wheel button and issue voice commands to R1. For example, in the case of calling a taxi, the user simply holds the button and says, "Help me book an Uber to the office." After a few seconds of analysis, R1 displays the cost and other details on the screen and then proceeds to book the ride. The same applies to ordering meals or playing music.
According to the official introduction, Rabbit R1 is not intended to replace smartphones but aims to free users from tedious tasks as their AI assistant.
Users don't need to pull out their phones to switch between various app windows or perform operations. Rabbit R1 uses AI to help streamline these operational steps, allowing users to call tools with just a single interface, thus enhancing the efficiency and experience of human-machine interaction.
In summary, the positioning of this device is as a portable AI assistant. Its functionality is not particularly rich and powerful, as they state. It is not intended to replace smartphones but rather to help users simplify the interaction process of some daily tasks through such a miniaturized device.
I think this is a very good idea and quite interesting, allowing users to, to some extent, break free from the relatively complex interaction experience of smartphones. However, this is precisely what people hope to achieve in the future through smartphones with built-in large-model intelligence.
With smartphone manufacturers fully embracing large models and AIGC, such interaction methods are not far from users. Moreover, compared to such small independent devices, smartphones will be more feature-rich, reducing the necessity for the existence of devices like Rabbit R1, as some netizens have pointed out: Why don't I just use my phone directly?