Two new gadgets launched in the United States this spring in quick succession have made the same promise: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) will wean you off your phone. While one is already a commercial failure, the other is either a glimpse of a post-iPhone world or… a scam.
It’s that the R1, of the start-up Californian company Rabbit, was launched very clumsily by a young entrepreneur who allegedly took advantage a little unfairly of the very speculative cryptocurrency market, letting down customers disappointed by the lack of return on the digital asset he sold them.
The fear put forward these days by the American specialized media is that the R1 is also a scam. It’s essentially an Android phone app packaged in a little orange thing 3 inches on a side, then sold for $275, an unnecessarily high price given the results.
The R1, however, is not stupid. It resembles the gadget of another Californian start-up, Humane: the AI Pin, a pin that you talk to to accomplish most of the tasks that a smartphone normally does.
Incomplete, the AI Pin was however put on the market too quickly, at too high a price and, failing to attract buyers, the company put itself up for sale just a few days after its launch.
Too poorly put together, the R1 raises fears of an equally premature end. However, he deserves a better fate.
To the tune of Star Trek
This gadget has two flaws. Its spec sheet is very modest. Its touchscreen is 2.9 inches and its MediaTek processor is already outdated. That hasn’t stopped hackers from hacking the device and installing a full Android system on it, rather than the generative AI application called Rabbit OS that powers it de facto.
Rabbit OS is the other fault of the R1: the monochrome interface does too little. It provides access in English only to voice command, a camera and a few settings. Voice command allows you to control a music stream on Spotify or Apple Music, hail an Uber vehicle, order a meal on DoorDash or generate an image via Midjourney.
The camera allows you to take photos of objects or places about which you can then question the AI on board the R1. The settings allow you to connect to a WiFi network or Bluetooth headphones.
In principle, the R1 recalls the communicator used by the crew of theEnterprise In Star Trek : we press the button, we bring it to his mouth and we speak to him. Obviously, it’s an AI that responds to us, rather than Spock or Scotty…
But the requests that can be made of him are extremely limited. For questions of general interest, the R1 uses the Wolfram Alpha search engine. Everything else falls into the void. No messaging, text, email or voicemail. And its rare functions drain its battery, whose charge only lasts 4 hours. It’s not enough.
Unsurprisingly, no one recommends buying this thing. Especially since there is no guarantee that Rabbit will continuously update its software.
Phone, idiot
The pirated version of R1, on which the Android system and Google services are installed, including the Gemini assistant, falls into another register. It joins a rapidly emerging movement: the return of old cellular telephone handsets.
In the last quarter, sales of what the Anglosphere calls ” dumb phones “, literally “dumb phones,” jumped 25% compared to the previous three months. The trend has been going on for at least a year.
Consumers trying to reduce their dependence on screens are increasingly opting for a phone that doesn’t have one, a screen, or has a very small one. This avoids falling into the trap of overly addictive social networks.
In its pirated version, the R1 presents itself as one of those stupid phones to which a few multimedia applications have been added, as well as a voice assistant really capable of accomplishing certain concrete tasks, such as writing an email, or doing research. online.
Obviously, the downside is that it is impossible to buy this gadget as is. You have to tinker with an R1, and it’s not that simple. Another problem: if, one day, a manufacturer has the good idea to replicate this model, there is no guarantee that it will in turn fulfill the promise of replacing modern large-screen phones.
In fact, even a finished, fully functional product powered by generative AI will still run the risk of producing “hallucinations,” or generating responses that appear true but are in reality completely false.
In other words, we may have discovered the replacement for that screen that we hold in our pocket and that we always look at too often. Or, we discovered the scam of the decade: poorly constructed gadgets sold at high prices and which fulfill none of their promises.
