Cant Rabbit r1 eat your smartphone? Premium

The Rabbit r1, a palm-sized device, showcased at CES 2024, with natural language processing capabilities, aims to disrupt the smartphone market.

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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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.