There's a new AI personal assistant on the block. It's called the Rabbit R1. I'm not sure how to best describe it. It's like what you'd get by crossing ChatGPT with Life Alert and a Jitterbug phone. (Watch the keynote.) It's a pocket device that is supposed to execute actions that would normally require an app on a phone. For example, instead of using the Lyft app, you press the Rabbit R1 button and say, "Book a Lyft from here to Clark's drug store". The Rabbit Schtick is that it uses a Large Action Model (LAM) in addition to a Large Language Model (LLM) to understand what you want and perform the action you want. In other words, it has a model of how people take actions, such as using a Jersey Mike's app to order a hoagie.
Here's the catch. You need to go to a computer and make Rabbit aware of your accounts. The good news is that you log in at the computer, not at the pocket device, so Rabbit doesn't store your password. The bad news is that you can often do exactly the same thing with something like Samsung's Bixby, and you don't need a computer. You log into your Lyft app on the same phone as Bixby. In both cases, you only have to log in once. After that, Rabbit or Bixby will simply perform the action for you. (I'm guessing other phone assistants work better than Bixby, but I can only speak for what I have on my phone.)
The cool thing isn't so much the LAM itself but how well it integrates with the AI. Watch the keynote and you'll see he orders a 12 inch pizza from Pizza Hut (hey, there's no accounting for taste) telling Rabbit to choose the most popular order style. The AI finds out the most popular order is sauce and cheese and asks you to confirm the order. I have to admit, that's a pretty cool integration of ChatGPT-like AI and action. Although I'm impressed with the choices Rabbit gives you when you describe what kind of vacation you want, I personally don't want an AI to make those kinds of choices for me. I want to sift through every possibility at a travel agency or at the computer.
The best thing about the Rabbit R1 is that it's only $199. Yeah, I can do everything it does (and more) with my phone if I'm willing to use apps instead of hooking up a pocket device to a bunch of services by using a computer. Again, watch the keynote, and make a mental note of how many times he has to go to the computer to get Rabbit to accomplish something. Is that really easier than using an app on your phone? But I do think Rabbit is onto something here. I look forward to where they're going with this idea.
