This year’s Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas was littered with updates from both start-ups and large tech firms that are building products harnessing, or in some cases, advancing the power of natural language processing (NLP), a burgeoning sub-field under artificial intelligence (AI).

With so many exhibits, it is difficult to point out any one piece of tech as exceptional this year. Still, an orange-coloured, square-shaped device unveiled at the ballroom at Wynn, and not at the official CES stage, grabbed the spotlight.

The palm-sized handheld, called Rabbit r1, received a fair amount of chatter at CES 2024 as it could do – – per the company’s claim – – several things that a smartphone can’t. Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called it the ‘most impressive’ device, and compared it to the first iPhone unveiled by Steve Jobs.

So, what exactly does this device do?

If you want to book an Uber ride, the r1 can do it for you. If you want to plan a vacation, including booking air tickets and making room reservations, the r1 can do that for you. If you want some cooking ideas, the r1’s camera can scan the motley ingredients in your refrigerator and suggest a recipe based on your calorie requirement. All you have to do is just ‘tell it’ what to do.

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Exploiting chatbots’ limitation

Granted, any of the latest generation smartphones with its state-of-the-art voice assistant can do several tasks like searching the web, playing your favourite song, or making a call from a user’s phonebook. But, executing tasks, like booking a cab, reserving hotel room, and putting together a recipe using computer vision, just by talking into a walkie-talkie style device, is a stretch even for smartphone-based voice assistants.

Even the current crop of chatbots, like ChatGPT, Bard and Claude, can only text out responses through apps as they are incapable of executing actionable tasks. For instance, the ChatGPT app can text you a vacation plan. It can even tweak the itinerary if you ask it to make it easy or packed. But, it cannot open a ticket booking app or a room reservation portal to make a reservation for you.

Rabbit Inc., the maker of r1, says that the current batch of chatbots have limited functionality because they are built on text-based AI models – – more commonly known as large language models (LLMs). LLMs’ accuracy depends a lot on annotated data to train neural networks for every new task.

Extending LLM’s capability

The Santa Monica-based start-up, on the other hand, has built its r1 device using a different AI model that is biased for action. The Rabbit OS, in a way, extends the capabilities of the current generation of voice assistants.

The AI model, which the company calls a large action model (LAM), takes advantage of advances in neuro-symbolic programming, a method that combines the data driven capabilities of the neural networks with symbolic reasoning techniques. This allows the device to directly learn from the user’s interaction with the applications and execute tasks, essentially bypassing the need to translate text-based user requests into APIs.

Apart from bypassing the API route, LAM-based OS caters to a more nuanced human to machine interaction. While ChatGPT can be creative in responding to prompts, a LAM-based OS learns routine and minimalistic tasks with a sole purpose of repeating it.

So, Rabbit Inc., in essence, has created a platform, underpinned by an AI model, that can mimic what humans do with their smartphones and then repeat it when asked to execute. The r1 is the company’s first generation device, which according to its founder Jesse Lyu, is a stand-alone gadget that is primarily driven by natural language “to get things done.”

The company has also cleverly priced the device at $199, significantly lesser than the price of most flagship smartphones. This makes it difficult to decipher whether customers will buy this device for the value it offers or just because it is cheap.

But is the price differentiation alone enough to trade in your existing smartphone for the new Rabbit r1?

A smartphone replacement?

Booking a ride, planning a vacation, or playing music are only a subset of things we do with a smartphone. Over last roughly one and half decade the smartphone has become a pocket computer.

The app ecosystem built for this hardware has made the device so sticky that an average user picks up their smartphone at least 58 times a day, and spends, on average, at least three hours with it. And during that time, they use this mini-computer for whole host of things, not to mention streaming videos, playing games, reading books, and interacting with friends and family via group chat applications.

Secondly, not everyone wants to speak into a device all the time to get something done. Most people are just fine typing in text prompts and getting responses in the same format. It gives them a layer of privacy that the r1 does not provide – – that’s because the latter can only execute voice commands.

So, the smartphone, and its app ecosystem, is here to stay to cater to an entire gamut of user needs and wants for the foreseeable future.

Now, where does that leave Rabbit r1?

Into the Rabbit hole

Mr. Lyu believes the r1 will disrupt the smartphone market, but technically, his company’s palm-sized device is a strong contender in the voice assistant and smart speaker market, which is also space that is growing quite steadily.

According to a 2022 joint report by NPR and Edison Research, in the U.S. alone, 62% of users over the age of 18 use voice assistant on any smart device. And the number of tasks they do with it is alap increasing: In 2022, smart speaker users requested an average of 12.4 tasks on their device each week, up from 7.5 in 2017. And smartphone voice assistant users requested an average of 10.7 tasks weekly, up from 8.8 in 2020.

This shows that the r1 can play an important transition role in the audio space by driving hardware designers and software developers in the direction of building more voice-based interoperable application. Alternatively, Rabbit inc can also building a super app — something like a WeChat app that can enable chatter between apps in a smarphone to ‘get things done.’

That’s a call Rabbit Inc. should take based on the feedback it receives from its customers. As on January 19, five batches of 10,000 (batch size) rabbit r1 devices have been sold out. And the first batch will start shipping in April. Customer experience with this new gadget will play a big role in how deep r1 will take consumers down the rabbit hole.