Rabbit R1, a factor that ought to simply be an app, truly is simply an Android app

When startups like Humane and Rabbit first unveiled their AI-powered devices a few months in the past, early backers have been hopeful that these AI companions would usher in a brand new period of wearable AI. Sadly for them, each merchandise launched half-baked, leaving tech reviewers with no alternative however to harshly criticize them.

The Rabbit R1, for instance, does nearly nothing that your Android cellphone can’t do. In our hands-on, we famous that the gadget helps you to do issues like discuss to a big language mannequin (LLM) to get solutions to questions, take a photograph of an object to get data about it, play music from Spotify, hail a trip from Uber, or order meals from Doordash, however that’s principally it. If all the pieces an AI gadget just like the Rabbit R1 can do may be replicated by an Android app, then why aren’t these corporations merely releasing an app as a substitute of {hardware} that prices lots of of {dollars}, requires a separate cell information plan to be helpful, and has horrible battery life? It seems that’s precisely what Rabbit has achieved…type of.

See, it seems that the Rabbit R1 appears to run Android beneath the hood and the complete interface customers work together with is powered by a single Android app. A tipster shared the Rabbit R1’s launcher APK with us, and with a little bit of tinkering, we managed to put in it on an Android cellphone, particularly a Pixel 6a.

As soon as put in, we have been in a position to arrange our Android cellphone as if it have been a Rabbit R1. The amount up key on our cellphone corresponds to the Rabbit R1’s {hardware} key, permitting us to proceed by way of the setup wizard, create a “rabbithole” account, and begin speaking to the AI assistant. For the reason that Rabbit R1 has a considerably smaller and decrease decision show than the Pixel 6a, the house display screen interface solely took up a tiny portion of the cellphone’s show. Nonetheless, we have been in a position to hearth off a query to the AI assistant as if we have been utilizing precise Rabbit R1 {hardware}, as you possibly can see within the video embedded beneath.

We didn’t trouble testing out another performance, akin to Spotify integration, Imaginative and prescient, and many others., however we wouldn’t be stunned if a few of them didn’t work. In any case, the Rabbit R1’s launcher app is meant to be preinstalled within the firmware and be granted a number of privileged, system-level permissions — solely a few of which we have been in a position to grant — so among the features would possible fail if we tried. Nonetheless, the truth that this app works in any respect on my cellphone is hilarious and is a testomony to the truth that, at their core, a variety of these area of interest {hardware} merchandise run on a modified model of AOSP.