Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable

[Music] so this is the rabbit R1 and it's another AI in a box and it's a sign of the times so this thing here it has a lot in common with the Humane AI pin for better for worse but it's also supposed to have two specific things that are supposed to set it apart from that supposed to anyway and we have to talk about it so stop if this sounds familiar at any point but check this out this is a virtual assistant in a box but it's a different box this one is not wearable it's a thing you have to carry around with you in your pocket like a smartphone I'd say it's about the size of a stack of posits maybe but it's this lightweight plastic Cube designed by teenage engineering and boy do people love some teenage engineering right now and it's super I mean you can tell exactly what it is from a mile away this thing is very recognizable the thing has one button on the right side that's the one you press and hold to ask it questions and then instead of a projector it actually does have a built-in screen here and instead of built-in cellular it has a SIM card tray right alongside that USB type-c port for charging I'd say it does seem to send basically every single request to the cloud but I will say it does feel significantly quicker to answer questions than the Humane AI pin now that is a very very low bar to clear but it is it's consistent it's consistently quicker how far away is the Moon the average distance between Earth and the Moon is approximately 384,000 or it would do that automatically after a few seconds then hit the button again to wake it up boom just the rabbit waiting for you there and then to get to settings there's no button to press for that there's no gesture on the screen or anything you just shake it like an etes sket as long as you do that then from there you can scroll up and down with this scroll wheel and select with the button that's how you get around the UI so the other two things it has are the scroll wheel and a swiveling camera so the scroll wheel for navigating around the UI instead of the screen is I'll get to why it's odd in a second but then of course the AI assistant is multimodal and so you can use Vision to answer questions about what it sees so we've seen this before with this one you double tap to swivel it open and then press and hold to ask I don't know what type of plant is this taking a look now the plant in the image appears to be a Monera deliciosa also known as a Swiss cheese plant this is a type of tropical climbing Evergreen plant native to Southern Mexico and parts of Central America the large glossy green leaves with distinct as a reviewer testing this thing I just feel like that DJ khed clip after a while where I'm just pointing at stuff like okay what is this and what is this and what is this those are pickled banana peppers and what is this berries and seeds and perhaps what is this water but I've also I've just pointed it at my computer screen with a really long email on it and asked it for a summary and it just reads it instantly gives me a summary of it it's done that with articles too I think that's pretty cool but yeah it's just a it's an AI in a box it's best at just answering questions so yeah this thing is also bad at a lot of stuff and this this list is going to sound pretty familiar somehow the battery life is just as bad as the Humane pin it has a th000 mAh battery inside and it's brutally bad like it's already bad enough when you're carrying around a whole another device alongside your smartphone but when this one can sit in front of you doing nothing and the battery just visibly is draining and dies in like 4 hours then you have to charge it multiple times per day and it's still dead when you wake up in the morning like it's just exhausting also it took 45 minutes to charge this tiny battery from Z to 100 and it's also just straight up missing a ton of what I would consider just basic features like they can't set alarms can't set timers it can't record videos can't record photos can't send emails there's no calendar built in there's just a lot of things that I would want an assistant to do not here and of course being an AI assistant it also does still hallucinate and confidently answer questions wrong like my Baseline of asking a question that I know the answer to and then getting the wrong answer happens all the time just one of the downfalls of this category so this device was designed by teenage engineering and they're really leaning into that like that's why I mean it's this bright orange it is really friendly looking device I would say intentionally uh but yeah they really love their analog controls this scroll wheel here doesn't surprise me but it's actually really frustrating to use first of all it protrudes out the back a little bit as you can see which looks kind of cool but that means if it was really sensitive that it would actually scroll if you just put it down on a table or something so they've dialed down the sensitivity of the scroll wheel so it's actually super slow like 's a surprising amount of scroll motion required to go down one line in the settings and then there's no haptic feedback here as you're scrolling to help you feel it out so fine okay you can get used to that you use the button to select but then you've also noticed there's no back button anywhere on this device so to go back up a level you have to scroll all the way back up to the top every single time that also gets annoying and then to change brightness or volume you actually need two hands so you just go into bright brightness to select and you hold the button with one hand and then scroll the scroll wheel with the other hand to adjust brightness which yeah you just you can't do it with one hand it works so you can learn it and you can say you know it's this quirky UI it's got going on but I feel like a lot of these problems would be solved if this was a touchcreen so what if I told you this is a touchcreen and they just don't really let you use it for almost anything like moving through these menus would be easier if if I could just tap what I wanted to right going back after a long scroll would be easier if I could just flip scroll back to the top of a list and hit back but you can't the only thing you can use the touchcreen for is basically typing on the keyboard in terminal mode so with terminal enabled you can turn it sideways a keyboard pops up and you can type your questions and get text answers which is great and you can move between letters with the scroll wheel it's kind of a neat feature I guess but why can't we use the touchscreen for anything else is it just them trying not to look too much like a smartphone maybe probably so okay what's the point why does this thing exist if it's so similar to the other one that was also so bad what are we doing here uh and really there's two things that I think they're hoping will be the things that set it apart from the other one that should in the words of their co-founder Jesse but I don't think I don't think MKBHD will say this is the worst device he ever reviewed so far which low bar but okay those two things are the price tag and the large action model so the Humane pin was so easy for everyone to dunk on because it was it costs as much as a phone it was $700 with a $24 a month subscription to not turn into a brick it's just insane so this one right here costs $200 and no subscription so you know okay that that hits a little different but also you can tell it's $200 first of all you will need a separate SIM card to get it to work on cellular so while there is no subscription fee for rabbit to keep the device working that is still a fee you're going to pay every month to get data outside of Wi-Fi but then okay the unboxing experience is extremely minimal it comes in a single cardboard box with a cassette tape looking plastic container that doubles as a stand but there's literally nothing else no charging brick no USBC cable no stickers no paper instruction manual nothing at all and then the R1 itself is made of plastic not to say that it's not built well you know there's no flexing or creaking or anything like that but it's definitely plastic the camera very basic the speaker very cheap you know it's a low-end mediatech chip inside the same one that's in the Moto G8 power light which is like a $150 phone hardly any battery as we learned and no fancy fast charging or wireless charging and it comes in one color really bright orange like this ridiculously saturated bright orange I'm not even joking the color you're seeing in this YouTube video on your screen it's going to be the best I can do with my own color correction but it's legitimately hard to photograph like the phone camera doesn't really turn saturation up high enough to really represent it accurately in real life it's the brightest orange thing you've ever seen in your life I guarantee it now if you want something a little more low-key than the neon orange Channel sponsor dbrand actually does have you covered here I've got this black camo looking one here and now the orange bits that show through are kind of like more accent pieces which is pretty dope but fun fact dbrand also collaborated with rabbit ahead of the release to make sure screen protectors for this thing were also available on launch day so that includes mine if you want to check it out screen protectors or skins for the R1 you can hit up the link below but yeah speaking of the screen this is a 2.9 in diagonal TFT screen with no auto brightness so yeah I think you get the idea so you know how the Humane AI pin had no apps well this thing also has no apps but the other thing that they're hoping will separate it from the other stuff is what they're calling a large action model so you know large language models are just the words the language that we use so it's an AI that can take our natural language and process it and turn it into words in return and that's how we interact with it so a large action model is supposed to take our words and then process it and turn it into actions that's the theory so it's basically going to be able to use apps for you like a human would based on what you tell it to do now importantly this isn't the same as an API where you know a company might work with the others to have some sort of a plug into their services that they work together because an API can be a little too restrictive or not give all the features or just not quite I mean there's lots of good reasons why they don't want to rely on an API so what this is supposed to be doing is just going in and using the app just like a human essentially with like a mouse and a keyboard think of it as like a virtual agent honestly I think it's a really cool idea I think it's a really really cool idea you know large language models have been trained with all their data to talk back to us just like humans would and some of are very convincing so a large action model in theory should be able to use these apps and services just like a human would for from Spotify to Twitter to your banking app to whatever else it's already good enough at recognizing major UI elements like a play button or a buy button and things like that so with enough training data could get really good with enough training data could get really good but the thing is they don't have a ton of training data yet so as of right now they have made four apps available four they have this online portal called The Rabbit Hole where you can log into and enable all of them Spotify Uber door Dash and mid Journey so the rabbit can talk to these four apps and has a UI on the screen for doing so in the exact way that we're theorizing so it'll play Spotify songs like I can ask it for a song and it'll try to play the right one and it'll show you any info you need on the touch screen to confirm or refine the actions you're taking but even now they kind of work like I've already had issues with it playing the wrong song I've also seen other people already have issues with the door Dash app getting things wrong which is even more frustrating I can't imagine how frustrating the Uber app messing up would be it definitely seems like it needs more training data and that's just for these four starting apps now rabbit says they have 800 different apps trained already but they just haven't built a UI for it yet so it's not available on the rabbit yet and so that's still in the works now they've also theoretically started working on something called a generative UI where essentially it can recognize what type of app it is and then build a UI for it so Rabbit doesn't have to but that's also still theoretical and also on the road map and still in the works and then if there's another app or service that you want your rabbit to be able to do like some something for work or something super Niche that you've invented they've talked about something called Teach mode mode which is basically having the rabbit watch you do what you want it to do on your mouse and keyboard and then it learns from what you did and can then repeat your actions later which is sick unfortunately you can probably already see where this is going teach mode is also not available as of right now this is something they're still working on vetting and finishing and so that's just later this year also in the works so as of right now this device has none of that stuff just the four kind of half working apps that we went over at the beginning what what are we doing here okay I'm going to try not to turn this into a rant but I just I feel like we need to acknowledge at least that uh a lot of these tech companies are developing Tech kind of backwards like they are delivering such unfinished products that it actually makes them nearly impossible to review like it you it feels like it used to just make the thing and then put it on sale now it's like put it on sale and then deliver the half-baked thing and then iterate and make it better and hopefully with enough updates then it's it's ready and it's what we promised way back when we first started selling it and then this this whole period in the middle is a mess and it's across all kinds of product categories too we've seen this with gaming like huge studios are delivering half-baked games saying oh you know it's an alpha version like there will be updates but meanwhile it's a full price trip AA game that's just got an unacceptable number of bugs and issues it's also happening with cars and vehicles getting announced and then delivering with like a half-finished state where you just don't get a lot of the features that you paid for and they're eventually coming soon with a software update you know smartphones obviously we've been seeing this for years but it does seem like now more than ever there's at least one feature one major feature of every smartphone launch that gets announced but that's not coming until later in the year and now these AI based products are at like the Apex of this horrible Trend where the thing that you get at the beginning is like borderline nonfunctional compared to all the promises and all the features and all the things that it's supposed to maybe someday be but you still pay full price at the beginning which is what makes it so crazy and that sucks not only obviously for the people buying it at full price at the beginning but also for reviewing these things in general like how do you assess a product where the version of what's promised in like 3 years what it could be is amazing but the version that's being delivered now is dog water like how how do you connect those dots do you even connect those dots are you supposed to given the benefit of the doubt I don't know what are we even doing here I mean I guess on one hand it is good that Tech products these things can get better over time and improve and the thing you buy can be better tomorrow that's all great that didn't used to be true and that's beautiful and everything but it on the other hand it's just the other side of that coin is some very unfinished products being delivered and I just feel like it's going to get worse before it gets better so let me just say I am personally very excited by the idea of a super personalized AI assistant that can do everything that a human assistant could that's my that's my dream I want that to happen and I'm interested that these different companies are approaching it from different angles and hopefully we'll get there eventually but this is also so clearly going to take a lot of time and effort and Technical development and also a lot of data like I've I said this already in the Humane review I'm pretty sure which is a good assistant needs to know everything about you whether it's human or virtual like it needs to know your preferences and your location and what you're doing and what you like to do and every single little thing it's so much data so as for the rabbit I think that's why they focused on getting the price so low like this stuff is all a tough sell because you're taking a gamble on what the product could be someday but for the pin you have to drop $700 and $24 every month on the chance that it might someday get there like that's a lot of money but for this cute little thing 200 bucks feels like a much easier investment to make a much easier pill to swallow to just take a gamble on it and on the off chance it turns out to be awesome in a couple of years it'll feel like it's worth it you know on the chance that some of those 800 apps are super useful or you know even though you already have a smartphone maybe the teach mode lets it do something with a single button press that you could never dream of before then it could be totally worth it the whole situation reminds me kind of of if you if you look back at the beginning of when Tesla started shipping cars with all the autopilot stuff they were selling cars and they got popular for other reasons it was a good electric car with good range and a good charging Network and then people started sort of beta testing this autopilot stuff and Tesla starts collecting millions of miles and hours of data from how it works in the real world and so all that data helped their systems learn and get the Head Start that they need on trying to make the best autopilot software so the rabbit I'm sure would like to use their price advantage and get as many of them out into the real world as possible into people's hands so they can start beta testing and having it trained in getting good at a variety of tasks but the rabbit's problem is it doesn't have like the other reason why people would get it anyway today so it's it's like a kind of a chicken and egg problem so if you want my advice you've heard it before buy the product based on what it is today and not what it's promised to be in the future and with this category that's like the hardest thing to do the hardest thing to keep in mind because the promise is so big but that's still my advice and I guess we still also have yet to see what big companies like Google and apple are going to try to do in this space probably this year so with all of that we'll see thanks for watching catch you in the next one peace

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 675,261

Keywords: Rabbit R1, Rabbit vs, Rabbit R1 vs, Human AI pin, Humane pin, MKBHD, Rabbit R1 review, AI in a box

Id: ddTV12hErTc

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024