Rabbit R1, a thing that should just be an app, actually is just an Android app

When startups like Humane and Rabbit first unveiled their AI-powered devices a couple of months in the past, early backers have been hopeful that these AI companions would usher in a new period of wearable AI. Unfortunately 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 telephone can’t do. In our hands-on, we famous that the gadget permits you to do issues like speak to a giant language mannequin (LLM) to get solutions to questions, take a photograph of an object to get information about it, play music from Spotify, hail a journey from Uber, or order meals from Doordash, however that’s mainly it. If all the pieces an AI gadget just like the Rabbit R1 can do can be replicated by an Android app, then why aren’t these corporations merely releasing an app as a substitute of {hardware} that prices a whole lot of {dollars}, requires a separate cellular knowledge plan to be helpful, and has horrible battery life? It seems that’s precisely what Rabbit has completed…kind of.

See, it seems that the Rabbit R1 appears to run Android below the hood and all the 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 telephone, particularly a Pixel 6a.

Once put in, we have been capable of arrange our Android telephone as if it have been a Rabbit R1. The quantity up key on our telephone corresponds to the Rabbit R1’s {hardware} key, permitting us to proceed by the setup wizard, create a “rabbithole” account, and begin speaking to the AI assistant. Since the 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 telephone’s show. Still, we have been capable of hearth off a query to the AI assistant as if we have been utilizing precise Rabbit R1 {hardware}, as you’ll be able to see within the video embedded beneath.

We didn’t trouble testing out another performance, comparable to Spotify integration, Vision, and so on., however we wouldn’t be stunned if a few of them didn’t work. After all, the Rabbit R1’s launcher app is supposed to be preinstalled within the firmware and be granted a number of privileged, system-level permissions — solely a few of which we have been capable of grant — so among the capabilities would doubtless fail if we tried. Still, the very fact that this app works in any respect on my telephone is hilarious and is a testomony to the very fact that, at their core, a lot of those area of interest {hardware} merchandise run on a modified model of AOSP.