On the occasion of the last edition of CES, the Californian start-up Rabbit was widely talked about with its R1 case. Equipped with an operating system designed around a natural language interface, it is capable of circulating between the different applications that the user is accustomed to using. Today, after having sold several thousand devices, the start-up is going further and announcing a partnership with another well-known start-up, ElevenLabs.
Behind this merger, the objective is to build AI audio tools that improve content accessibility, remove language barriers, and, ultimately, improve user experiences. Concretely, when R1 users execute voice commands, a voice powered by ElevenLabs will respond. “We are working with Rabbit to bring the future of human-device interaction closer,” said Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs.
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A truly dynamic co-pilot
“We wanted the user experience with R1 to be smooth and intuitive, so we built it as a standalone device that uses natural language input to help you get things done,” says Jesse Lyu, founder and CEO of Rabbit.
“With R1, you can simply press a button and speak to it as if you were speaking to your own personal assistant. ElevenLabs' ultra-high quality, low-latency voice models help make this interaction very natural.” However, it should be noted that, initially, only English will be supported with a single voice option.
Perplexity AI brings AI-powered search
R1 already benefits from other capabilities, notably thanks to a partnership announced earlier this year with the start-up Perplexity AI. The latter has developed a search service powered by AI. Through an online LLM API called “PPLX”, Rabbit's box can answer its users' questions in real time “without any limit of knowledge”, as pointed out by Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI.
The user only has to ask questions in natural language to a simple interface – a chatbot – and is returned answers that cite the sources. To attract users, the two start-ups had also specified that for the first 100,000 purchases of Rabbit R1, a year of Perplexity Pro is offered (in the form of credits in the amount of $200). The Pro subscription includes access to the latest LLMs like GPT-4 and normally costs $20 per month.
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