Oddly enough, almost all of the third-party integrations the company introduced – DoorDash, Uber, Midjourney and more – are being discontinued, so these features simply won’t work. (Not that they actually worked before.) The scroll wheel is less jerky and the UI improvements are welcome. For example, you can now hold down the Push-to-Talk button and scroll up or down to change the volume.
There have been a number of updates to the R1 over the year, but three stand out: Beta Rabbit, LAM Playground and Teach Mode.
Beta Rabbit uses improved large language models for a better conversation experience when you ask the R1 something. I didn’t find it all that conversational GPT-4o or Gemini Live. I asked it how we know about the early years of the universe, and it began reading an excerpt. At one point “cosmic microwave background” was mentioned, at which point I interrupted and asked how this is detected. The R1 then launched into a tirade saying, “Looking for the cosmic microwave background,” “Looking for this,” and “Looking for that.” After five of these, a response about CMBs finally began to be read out.
LAM Playground is an interesting feature accessible via Rabbit’s web portal. These “big action models” run on a virtual browser that you can interact with, and are primarily intended to demonstrate how Rabbit can perform tasks on your behalf. (You know, because that wasn’t possible at startup!) Type a command prompt and Rabbit’s bots will run it. For example, you can ask it to find an item and add it to your Amazon shopping cart. However, you have to log in to Amazon via this virtual browser, which poses a huge privacy risk.
I asked it to search for “best office chair” on Google and then redirect me to the retailer’s website. It took way too long to do this and it was typed “Best Office Chair Reviews 2023”. (Is the R1 in a different timeline?) But it still went to the first result (which is all my own). Office Chair Guidethank you very much) and it led me to the product page The ergonomic chair Pro from Branchmy top recommendation.
While you can see how this all works on LAM Playground, you can put it into action in Teach Mode. It’s still in beta (I’d argue the R1 is still in beta too). After a few attempts I kept getting an error message that made the function unusable. Finally it worked another day. I created a lesson and then ran the steps in a virtual browser – the R1 logs every click. Then when I told my R1 device to perform the action, it mimicked my actions.
