The R1 is great at fetching answers to your questions, logging notes, meetings etc. But I wanted a less buttoned up version that could serve as a casual chat companion.
R1 Desktop Chat is meant to simply sit on your desk (or counter, or table) and engage in casual conversation.
Once launched, the app will show a pair of animated eyes. The screen stays on while the app is running, so plug it in and leave it sitting there as long as you want.
If there’s something you want to chat about, hold the side button as normal and say what’s on your mind. If you don’t know what to talk about but still want to chat, just tap the button and it will initiate a conversation for you to engage in. Feeling extra shy? The idle time setting will automatically initiate a conversation at predefined time intervals if you don’t interact with it at all. Just scroll to see settings and adjust what you’re open to chatting about.
Conversations are not stored in your journal, so you don’t have to worry about these casual dialogs cluttering up your rabbithole.
Tip: Give it a turning neck by putting it in a face tracking phone holder (like this one) while it sits on your desk.
… Nice detail…
Personal interests - provide them and they’ll be included in the idle time conversation starters.
Local news - plug in your zip/postal code and it’ll use that location to dig up local news and weather for user engagement.
Saves options - user options are now saved after exiting the app. Shout out to 
Custom Idle Time - Specify the amount of time you want between topics rather than selecting from a predefined time list. I find that I use this a lot while driving alone and I like hearing more frequent news headlines.
Redundancy Fixed - I noticed that I would sometimes get the same news item covered more than once in a session. Now, once it covers a topic, it won’t cover it again. Should help keep things fresh!