- Author, Zoe Kleinman
- Role, Technology Editor
I’ve just spent the last few days with the latest gadget that’s being billed as being able to take on a smartphone: the Rabbit R1.
I wanted to see if I could imagine this artificial intelligence (AI) wearable digital assistant one day becoming what my phone is—something I can’t live without.
You can see the thinking behind it: millions of people have played with AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
Given the success with software, it seems the next big thing for tech giants is to do the same with hardware and find ways to physically incorporate AI tools.
Microsoft is doing it with laptops, while Apple is rumored to follow suit with the next iPhone.
But there are also people trying to come up with a whole new category of gadgets – and that’s where the R1 comes in.
Rabbit says his new device is an “intuitive companion” that can “handle everyday digital tasks.”
An AI-powered wearable assistant that can help you through the day, get you off your phone and back into the real world… you can see how this could be a useful gadget.
The problem, however, is that several similar products have already been launched – and the reality falls short of the hype.
Take the Humane pin – a brooch device controlled by artificial intelligence.
American tech reviewer Marques Brownlee, who has 18 million followers on YouTube, captured the mood when he described it as the worst product he’s ever reviewed.
The R1 is now available in the UK and Europe. Is it better? I’ll tell you his – and my – verdicts later.
But first, let’s take a closer look.
Just ask
So let’s start with the good stuff.
The Rabbit R1 is a fun piece of hardware, in an age where nothing is touchscreen anymore, a glowing orange square with a big screen that you won’t lose in your purse.
It has a button, a scroll wheel, and a camera that you can see move from front to back while making a satisfying sound.
And it’s affordable, priced at £159, with no subscription required.
But what are you supposed to do about it?
Well, basically you can ask things. It’s currently pretty limited in terms of anything else.
There’s no social networking, messaging, shopping, health or banking — at least not yet. You can sign in to your Spotify or Apple Music accounts, but you’d want a bigger speaker than the built-in one.
And randomly, you can also use Midjourney, an AI image generator. That’s about all.
The Rabbit R1 successfully told me the time, the weather forecast, gave me the right way to my son’s school (after I told her my location), and quickly translated some conversation from English to German.
He lists the top 20 chess players of 2024 when my partner asked him who was the best, taking the answer from a list on chess.com. But it fared better than the Amazon Echo in that department—Alexa pounced on Garry Kasparov, who retired from regular competitive chess in 2005.
We asked him about several well-known conspiracy theories and he didn’t address them, and when I asked him who would win the next UK general election, the answer came from a YouGov poll that day.
So yes – it’s good to get stuff off the web. But me too.
is it a flower
It gave me pictures of where I work – the BBC Scotland building in Glasgow – but really struggled to tell me where to go for a coffee.
When I first asked, he said “give me a second” and then shut down after 112 seconds of silence.
I tried again and this time it was delivered fairly quickly, but of the five options listed, two cafes were 3.5 km away, one was closed, and one I couldn’t find on Google at all.
The closest it came was 1.3 miles away – in fact the building is lined with many options, with two large chain coffee shops within a few minutes’ walk.
He can use the camera to describe his surroundings – sometimes – but he was hallucinating a lot.
He told me that the vase of white peonies in my bedroom contained yellow chrysanthemums and confidently misidentified a plate of poppadoms as tortilla chips.
image source, BBC/Rabbit Inc
When I pointed the camera at myself, it described me as an “older woman” (deep breaths), and when my son pulled his most dramatic, angry face, it described him as a boy with a “friendly expression” (deep breaths) .
We used more than 20% of the battery life in the first hour.
Meanwhile, all your activity is stored in a cloud account called your rabbit hole, and you can’t access it on the device itself.
My Rabbit Hole (stop giggling in the back) is currently full of random photos of me and my surroundings and some equally random Magic Camera versions of these photos.
The verdict is in
I ended up walking away thinking that while it was fun to try out the device, it still doesn’t do anything I can’t already do with either my phone or my own eyes, and often more slowly.
And I promised to tell you what Marques Brownlee said about the R1: “barely reviewable” was the title of his video about it.
The company itself admits that it is a work in progress.
“Being an early stage startup is never about winning or losing – it’s all about survival,” said Rabbit founder Jesse Lyu.
“In some ways, I’m glad we’re getting feedback and doubt now because it pushes us to make a better and better product.”
And don’t expect the R1’s unflattering reviews to stop attempts to infuse AI into hardware.
“I expect to see a lot more devices in this genre over the next 18 months,” says Ben Wood, a smartphone watcher at CCS Insight.
“Still, my bet is that the smartphone will surpass all of these dodgy products in the foreseeable future — but it will feature many of the AI-driven innovations that were promised on standalone devices.”
That prediction sounds good to me.
My phone does everything the R1 can do and more, and it does it quickly and intuitively.
If anything, this “smartphone killer” has made me appreciate the device it’s trying to capture even more.