Why the fuck are they using a cloud tts on an Android device??? Can’t they use on device tts?? Seems extremely stupid for no reason
It’s expensive. They are paying a fee to the third party tts provider each single time someone needs a response. They boast “no subscriptions” - that means those fees are paid only by new customer purchases. Ponzi 2.0
It’s fucking expensive. Elevenlabs tts voices costs thousands of dollars per month plus $0.18 per 1000 characters. Ask the history of a monument and the verbose result that the LLM regurgitated costs them $0.15. Are they banking on the fact that most customers would just shelf the device after a day?
It’s slower. Each time the device needs to reply, it needs to stream an audio file instead of a few bytes of compressed text
For the more realistic voices it’s only cheaper in the short term. I get it - they don’t like the robotic free voices and licensing a good closed source one costs money. But then you don’t need to pay the “cloud” forever. Did they plan to shut down shortly after the launch? Where the money for running each user in a VM is coming out? (I saw from a YouTube video that it looked like they were using a browser automation tool in a VM)
At this point since everything is run on the cloud (=somebody else’s computer) this could not only be a smartphone app, but a smartwatch app.
I wonder if they will just fold and do a rug pull now blaming the hackers or fix the problem.
Fixing the problem seems difficult for them - need to fully rewrite the app and having everything proxied through their authenticated server, increasing their expenses (and a rushed fix isn’t secure/tested). But their money comes only from new investors and new customers, and at this point I doubt that they can sell more units or scam more investors.
Still think those people should have gotten a playdate instead, it’s more fun and certainly not less useful (which is, not at all).
(When I first heard about the r1 I immediately thought it was weird how the 2 devices looked alike, I’ve since learned they shared the same designers).
Calling this a startup is being excessively generous. Startups are meant to eventually be viable.
This is a scam. The product just feeds your queries into ChatGPT and spits out the response. The backend tech they’ve described flat out does not exist. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
Oh aye, I wasn’t suggesting that they have to know ALL of the tech to be able to post on a tech forum, I’m just surprised that they’re completely unaware of it, given it’s ubiquity on the tech forum over the past month or so.
He just means it’s been all over the tech internet lately, and he has a point.
of course not everyone knows everything, but this and the humane AI pin have been featured everywhere as they’re the first companies bringing llm focused AI products to market, and are generating a lot of hype, get a lot of critical articles, and a lot of youtube videos & investigations regarding them.
Not hearing about the Rabbit R1 when you followed tech news the past month was harder than playing whamagheddon during christmas time. So i get his surprise, and i don’t think his reply was mean spirited, it was hard to avoid hearing about it.
It can depend on your particular part of the tech-sphere. I barely saw anything about either of those, because I wasn’t all that interested in AI things, and didn’t really follow the kind of people who would talk about it. At most, it was a quick flash in the pan before it was overshadowed by other news.
Since no one is explaining and I have only ever heard of Rabbit on Lemmy (again with no context, probably a US thing), here is a Kagi quick answer:
what is rabbit and r1?
Based on the available information, the Rabbit R1 is a new AI-powered device developed by a tech startup called Rabbit Inc. and designed by Teenage Engineering. The key details about the Rabbit R1 are:
It is a standalone handheld gadget about half the size of an iPhone, with a 2.88-inch touchscreen and a rotating camera for taking photos and videos. 【1】【2】
The Rabbit R1 is powered by an AI assistant and is intended to help users interact with various apps and services on their smartphone, essentially acting as a remote control. 【3】【4】
It connects to the internet via 4G LTE and Wi-Fi, allowing it to provide real-time information and assistance. 【5】
The Rabbit R1 currently supports integration with apps like Uber, Spotify, Midjourney, and DoorDash, allowing users to control these services through the device. 【6】
Reviews of the Rabbit R1 have been mixed, with some criticizing its unreliable performance, inaccurate answers, and short battery life. 【7】【2】
In summary, the Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered handheld device that aims to provide a more convenient way for users to interact with various apps and services on their smartphones. However, it seems the device still has some issues that need to be addressed.
No fuck you. Just because search engines exist doesn’t mean we should normalize headlines and post titles with so little information that you have to Google shit for 3 minutes to figure out what they are talking about.
It’s not about the capability to find the info. it’s about the normalization of shitty writing that people like you enable. Fuck off with that hurrr durrr you’re so helpless…stfu. People who do this shit are annoying as fuck. It’s bad journalism.
Using Android as a base was honestly the most reasonable thing they did. No reason to reinvent the wheel. What they made with it is admittedly really shit, though.
Oh for sure, an Android OS base is fine, but it just reinforces the fact that the actual device is manufactured shovelware E-waste that could have just been an expensive app, as the hardware itself doesn’t do anything special…
I wouldn’t even say that. Even if they had a truly unique LLM that ran partially locally with a custom co-processor, Android might still have been a good choice. It’s just hard to beat an open source base that’s already compatible with most mobile hardware, and relatively easy to find Devs for.
No please don’t confuse these. One is a technological marvel that changed the world for the better and the other is just an orange box that doesn’t do anything at all except maybe steal your personal data.
the most interesting key is for elevenlabs, which gives full privileges. this allows us to:
(…) delete voices (and crash the rabbitOS backend, thus rendering all r1 devices useless)
we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it. the api keys continue to be valid as of writing.