You may remember the rabbit R1 from last year. It was the hand-held, orange, AI device that you interact with by using your voice. The R1 failed to really make an impact despite having a groundbreaking interactive voice interface, because it really didn’t do much that your smartphone couldn’t already do.
However, due to its relatively low price of $199 and a dedicated following among a group of users who love to tinker, it found its niche and has been in active development ever since.
Now, rabbit has just released a whole new operating system, the rabbitOS 2, that features a colorful new card-based design and vibe-coding agentic AI capabilities. So, if you’re already an R1 owner, you’re about to get a huge update.
You still talk to the device to use it, but when you press the button and talk to R1, the flow of the conversation is now visible on the screen. New multimodal functionality has also been added to the conversation, so you can use voice, text, and images together in the same query.
“Our vision when we launched R1 was to build a brand new experience where you can just talk to AI and it will understand you and do things for you. After launch, we realized there was a big gap between the high expectations of our users and the original software experience we delivered. So we decided to completely revamp the software and redesign the entire R1 experience,” said rabbit founder and CEO Jesse Lyu.
“rabbitOS 2 transforms rabbit R1 into a platform for people to create their own experiences with the power of AI. With rabbitOS 2, creations, and more than 30 OTAs over the past 16 months, R1 is a completely new device.”
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The new card-based design makes it easier to see and access the R1’s features with additional gesture functions added to the touch screen. rabbitOS 2 is based on the familiar concept of a deck of playing cards with each main feature getting its own card in the stack, so you can easily browser and access them by swiping on the screen or using the scroll wheel.
It sounds a bit like flipping through a Rolodex, and it addresses one of the major problems I found when using the device – that I felt a bit lost with only my voice to control it – so I’m looking forward to giving the new OS a spin.
The other main feature of the new rabbitOS 2 is creations, an agentic AI development that you vibe code. You can actually build software tools, games and other experiences on your device through real-time conversations. The creation will appear on your device just minutes after you finish describing it.
You don’t need any technical ability to vibe code a new creation. You can make your own or choose from a growing list of existing creations to install on your R1 for free.
So, while there is no new hardware to accompany the new OS, rabbit has said it will offer free global shipping on all new R1 orders until the end of September taken through the rabbit website.
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