End of the line.

all things rabbit
1

Well, this is the end of the line for me.
The direction the dev team is heading is not what I signed up for.
I knew from the get-go that this would be a product under development, I understood that the device wouldn’t be able to do what the teaser implied straight out of the box. Nor did I care about features, like Uber, Doordash, Spotify or any of the other selling points; I get around on my own electric vehicle, I cook my own meals and I like to own the physical media I enjoy. That’s not why I decided to support this project.
Now, roughly a year in, most of the services are not supported, most who never even worked unless you were living in a small corned part of the world (and as far as I can tell, not even then).
But I saw the potential and I was willing to participate in helping build a great product/service.
However, this last update was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Collecting carrots to trade for hats…!?!
I honestly got so pissed off I considered setting the device on fire and go on an over-the-top rant.
I decided not to and vented my frustration about updates no one asked for and my ever-increasing frustration with how the dev team kept ignoring us and spent time, energy and probably tonnes of money on other things.

I wanted to reply, but the thread was locked by whatshisname.
Yeah-nah-yeah, that’s not cool and I had it. It’s unbelievably disrespectful to end a relevant and constructive conversation by locking the thread and preventing users from weighing in with their opinions and experiences.
Why in the name of Jesus Christus are you not fixing the basic features that we are begging you to, at least, take a look at?
I could list over a dozen bugs/features that should be fixed, or some that got “fixed” that just got ignored/worse. But let me pick three:

  1. 24-hour time setting.
    Yes, you can now toggle 24 hours on/off. Problem is, it only removes the letters “AM/PM”. My device displays “4:41”… I’m checking my watch, it’s 16:41. For the love of God, why!?! (see attachment)

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  2. Turning sound FX off still leaves the shutter sound on.
    I know this is a minor issue, but that’s my whole point; it should be sooo easy to fix, yet it hasn’t. (Someone alluded that it’s to prevent Muppets from taking stealth pictures, but I’m not buying that since the device is one of the most orange things anyone has ever seen, plus you can just turn the volume off).

  3. Language support.
    I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt; I’m sure that’s something that takes time to implement. But really? Should it? The models have access to all the words, in most languages, that’s no secret.
    I’m told that simple translation is possible, so I just tried to get the bunny to translate a simple phrase from English to Japanese. Result? It kept on rambling about settings in Google Translate for eight minutes straight. I was intrigued since I understand it’s Playground/Teach mode related so I wanted to see where this was going.
    At the end, it repeated the sentence in English and that was it.

So when I realised that the dev team wasted everyone’s time with carrots and hats I had enough.

I don’t regret buying this device since I knew that if push came to shove I could always repurpose the (Android) unit and put apps on it instead (and I now TOTALLY agree with the haters that said “this should be an app”).
What I do regret is giving my money to this dev team who clearly doesn’t give a rat’s ass about us.
You may lock/delete/shove this topic, go ahead, prove me right, I don’t care anymore.
And don’t be sorry, be better.

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I believe the team is really small… I hope they will keep going and will grow more. I like the direction of experimentation and hope there will be a moment where the system gets a big rebuild. Rabbit is in the position to fill a niche if they don’t compete with the giants.

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I don’t understand some decisions either but I have to trust they know what they are doing!

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I’m also trying not to fall off the bandwagon, but I just wanna nail down some of that roadmap and start using it in the real world. If it was really complete, can someone please share all of their really awesome lessons with the community because I’m really struggling with it!

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I sympathise with much of what you are saying. The r-cade thing also put me off and I’m nw even more confused what direction that the team is taking. Is it entertainment (magic camera, r-cade) or is it an AI-assistant?

Imo, the R1 is doomed as an entertainment device (competing with thousands of app store developers) and I thought the driver behind the R1 was to save time instead of cost time.

But the 24 hour clock works fine for me.

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Not to belittle anyone’s frustrations and whatnot or take away from a few legit issues sprinkled in there, but honest question, why are some people so surprised/mad by the r-cade? It’s been a LONG requested thing by plenty of people to add some sort of game or tamagotchi thing to the r1, but now that it lands, some people act offended? Just don’t use it and go about your day.

Just a fun little harmless thing to help customize the r1 even more, who would hate fun :man_shrugging:

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I’m very happy with their direction so far.
They are exploring creative and meaningful ideas.
It sounds like you’ve let a couple of things get in the way of keeping an open mind.

We don’t know what their next big update will be. That’s a blessing.

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I think that’s a fair question to ask. I believe I was unaware of the number of people who had selected desire for games and tamagotchi. On that basis whilst I appreciate the fact they’ve made them and they’re cute etc. I’m just not sure I picked that over the original advertised features operating as one as a flexible AI assistant with a memory and journal instead of starting to focus on the games and tamagotchi avatar element. I’m trying to find the silver linings but I’m also asking for you all to share your lessons with the community if you have useful ones as I’d love to get into the LAM. I’ve struggled, that’s all! Happy to hear your POV too friend.

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I appreciate the response, and hope my question didn’t sound rude to those who weren’t jazzed about the r-cade, just genuinely curious. There have absolutely been some surprise features out of the blue we’ve gotten that would definitely warrant questioning, but I know the whole gamifying subject was something widely asked about since the dawn of rabbit time.

I don’t think they’re focusing on things like the r-cade, especially given that we’ve recently gotten playground and teach mode, which were both huge, but I can maybe see some worry as we’ve gotten gen ui/voice, and r-cade all rapid fire. My opinion, based on how many people were also saying how they wanted to make the r1 more personal over the year, was a small push to help bring that to reality at the end of the year.

They have said a few times that they have multiple teams working on multiple things, so it’s not a situation where the devs decided to pick that stuff over bug fixes, I just think it was deemed easier to get out for the holidays as a fun thing :man_shrugging:

I do think though - and have for a while - they should be more clear about what’s being worked on. I get being cautious for their team to put out an actual roadmap, but I feel like I’ve seen so many times we get a new feature and a ton of people assume they’re only working on that one thing and get worried, especially when we do have huge looming issues like language and various bugs. They may mention something in a voice chat, or on discord randomly, but to the greater masses, it never gets mentioned, which causes frustration when something drops and some were hoping for something else.

As far as teach mode stuff, I think a lot of the use comes from what people actually spend their time doing, it’s obviously harder to find use cases if someone sits at a pc all day, but for folks like me, one button for a million things makes it a lot easier while being on the road :slight_smile: - I get a lot of use myself out of lessons and the playground to set things on my calendar, send and check emails, summarize twitter, getting travel times between driving to locations, etc. I’m sure it’s pretty mundane compared to some, but I don’t put personal stuff on my work issued phone, so all of that along with everything else the rabbit can do makes it pretty indispensable during my work day.

All I can really say at the end of the day is that they do seem to see and take into account everyone’s worries - sometimes it takes a lot longer than we hope, but they are trying with what they have. I think they’re faced a lot of the time with trying to please everyone, and unfortunately whenever we get an update, some are always going to be frustrated with what was updated. Teach mode/playground are their main focus, so much of what they do has to support that, but I don’t think there’s ever a time when they just drop the important things completely over something superficial.

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I agree with your sentiments and I don’t want to add to a pile on Rabbit’s small team but really hoping they keep up the momentum which felt like it started to slow down.

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I appreciate how enthusiastically r1 is being further developed, although I can only guess how difficult it must be to wrestle with the AI in order to release a safe companion-thingy upon humanity.

I think the image gallery is fantastic, and the magic pictures are amazing!
My 9-year-old nephew is having so much fun with the hats!
I also like how my local time is displayed in a 24-hour format.

However, I understand Maako’s original point—I often feel the same way: seeing support for native languages is very important to me. I want to research and discuss things in my own language, but Rabbit misunderstands my German words and only transcribes nonsense—for example, names, etymology, places, and much more. Please don’t make non-English-speaking users wait too long to be able to use their “pocket friend” normally in everyday life. Up the irons!

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I wasn’t gonna say anything but… cats outta the bag :slight_smile:

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Sounds great and looking great! Can’t wait!

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Cool! I hope it will auto detect language. I have been using voice modes from multiple products lately and i use multiple languages together

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The short answer is “you’ll have to select the language for now, it won’t auto-detect”

The long answer is: we’re very cautious now about doing things that would slow down the response time of the r1. Language detection would require either a complete redesign of how we handle speech to text, or an additional “lag” of 1-2 seconds for every response.

Implementing it from the beginning would have left us with two choices:

  • All non-english speaking customers would get a worse experience than English speaking customers
  • A delay of 2-6 months for multi-language (and any other features) to release

We didn’t want to make either of those trade-offs, so, manual language selection was used. I agree - it’s not optimal, and I think we will get there eventually… it just won’t be part of the initial release. :frowning:

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Thanks for the info! Looking forward to the update

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