(C) BoingBoing
This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Rabbit R1 has 5,000 active users [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2024-09-26
The Rabbit R1 is the best-designed of the AI assistant gadgets to appear (compare to the "visitor lanyard"-esque Humane AI Pin) but was met by similarly poor reviews. AI-powered voice UX was not fully-baked, leaving owners frustrated by hinky Android gadgets. There are 5,000 active daily users of it, reports Fast Company's Liz Stinson, quoting one of the company's executives.
"I'm very frank with the criticisms," Lyu said. "I actually watch every single [piece of] YouTube coverage, see every Twitter shit post. I have a Notion file that I document by the timestamp of, 'Oh, this guy complained about that, and that guy complained about this.'" "The fact is, the early bad reviews didn't kill us, right?" he added. Lyu said that, now, around 5,000 people use the R1 daily, and his team has pushed 16 over-the-air updates to the R1 since its initial ship date. He views the R1 as an interactive product; and believes that it's imperative for hardware startups embrace imperfect if they want to be part of a conversation. "If you're a startup, you better ship early, period," he said.
They've sold 100,000, reportedly. 5 percent really doesn't sound like an encouraging active user number for a pocket gadget that costs $200. Has it improved, owners? You can already get them on eBay for about a third of the retail price and I like the hardware enough to maybe go for it in antipation not of a better AI assistant but just a cool little hackable display/clock/cyberdeck thingy. The isometric pixel rabbit remains adorable.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://boingboing.net/2024/09/26/rabbit-r1-has-5000-active-users.html
Published and (C) by BoingBoing
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/
