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Nabaztag: WiFi cute bunny

07.Oct.2007

I had already seen some pictures of Nabaztag, but I still hadn’t check out the features of the cute looking bunny. Then I saw yesterday a widget on Aral Balkan’s blog, where you can type a message and it will be read by his bunny. Lovely way to leave a message and it has had great results so far, apparently.

So I want and checked Nabaztag’s website. On a couple of flash videos you can see some of the great features the robot has. Through it’s WiFi connection it can collect and notify you of a variety of information like: time, weather, stocks, air quality, emails, RSS feeds. It has built-in some great functionalities like text-to-speech in 16 languages (Portuguese included), although it only talks (on other functionalities) in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. It also has voice recognition for a small number of words and, on the new version (Nabaztag/tag), music streaming and webradio. It’s also planned the creation of a RFID detector, enabling you to stick some specific RFID tags on object, that can be detected by the bunny.

Unfortunately, when we dig into the services information, you can discover that some of them are only available for a subscription fee, specially RSS feed reading, full email reading and podcasts. And besides that, there are a lot of complain about the quality and reliability of the services. Nabaztags also has integrated a nice message system from their website, but unless you are a paying subscriber, you’re limited to 15 messages a month.

By artidesign at Flickr.

The bunny is designed so all communications much pass through the Violet server (the company that created the Nabaztag). This means that, besides the lag, you can’t really do what ever you want with your robot. There is an HTTP API with some features like messaging, music streaming and controlling the ears movement and the lights. But you are still limited by the 15 messages a month.

Due to all the limitation, there are several projects working on freeing Nabaztags, like OpenNab and NabazClapier. You can also find libraries for some languages like Perl, Ruby and Java. You can find those tools here.

A Nabaztag/tag (the latest version) costs 134.90€ on the official store, but there are many resellers with lower prices. Additional colorful ears cost about 7€. I was really turned into buying one at first, but after digging a bit I think I’ll wait until the product and specially the services are more mature. However, that’s one robot bunny!

Some useful links:

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