[bko]

A bit off topic perhaps but what's difficult about making this a product? Please forgive my ignorance. Its just a microphone, speaker, could be a Bluetooth controller and a battery, and have it go through your phone. Maybe a small local neural net to monitor for keyword locally.

I guess it's a few more parts if you don't want it to go through your phone, but is that all that's happening here? What am I missing?

Is the hard part just the size? Or battery efficiency? Seems like all stuff i have in my drawer from messing around w raspberry pis over the last ten years

[agg23]

This is something you can accomplish very easily in a ESP32 form factor, streaming audio over wifi/bluetooth. However, it doesn't fully deliver the same experience; the goal was for it to replace your phone, so it needs to support a lot more functionality such as data persistence, offline support, notifications, cellular, maybe some form of visual IO (the laser projector), etc.

From my perspective I was just interested in the excellent industrial design, which is something that is virtually impossible for a DIY setup to attain.

[duskwuff]

> From my perspective I was just interested in the excellent industrial design

Debatable. The pin ran hot and had a short battery life, often less than a day even with the extended battery. The magnetic attachment was fiddly to use, and some users had trouble with it not staying put. The laser projector had serious usability problems - it wasn't very bright or clear, and interacting with the projected image (which was required to unlock the device, among other features) was extremely awkward.

One can argue that some of these are implementation issues, but working within the limitations of available technology is an inextricable part of industrial design. Dreaming up a perfect fantasy device is easy; designing one which can actually be implemented is much harder.

[0_____0]

What do you mean by 'making this a product?'

Building proofs of concept isn't that hard.

When you need to produce thousands of them, and you've got market/product/engineering requirements, V&V, component sourcing, production tooling to set up, and, importantly, a budget, things get hard (or at least time consuming) quickly.

[numpad0]

They engineered it properly, which costs a lot. Rabbit R1 was much like how you described; repurposed cheap Android phone with minimal gimmick.

This one looked a lot more lovely thanks to the amount of brain juice spent on it, but otherwise, the end result was ~same.

[beAbU]

The hard part is convincing investors that it's a good idea, so that they can drown you in gold. Or maybe that's the easy bit. I don't know.

The reason for failure here is lack of a killer app. Everyone is excited, then when they get it it's a glorified todo list and maybe it can read your texts. This failure mode is quite common and we've seen it with other devices like smart glasses, the Rabbit R1 pin, I suspect openAI's pin is going to be similar, and so on. Your average non-tech-enthusiast consumer will need a real good reason to carry around a front-facing camera full time.

[bobsmooth]

It's got a nifty laser projector, that's it. It could be a smartphone app.