The Nabaztag is a cool, and a potentially useful gadget. The name of this gadget means "rabbit" in armenian, and as you might have guessed this gadget is a bunny. Nabaztag was first released by the french company Violet. The rabbit offers some services such as: telling the time, providing Twitter and/or Email alerts, weather conditions, reading RSS feeds, playing podcasts...
Operation The strongest feature of the Nabaztag is that it is a standalone device. In other words, it does not need a computer to operate. The rabbit has a Wifi interface. It polls Violet servers every minute or so to check for new messages or events that might be waiting in its owners' queue. Violet's Applications'Repository This repository contains many applications including:
- A twitter client that retrieves your public time line. This client is supposed to fetch the time line as often as required. In practice, the client only fires once a day. Besides, the client is not customizable, that is it only fetches your public time line. Also, there is no point of reading URLs and special characters in tweets. All these shortcomings, made me write my own twitter client. This client is triggered as many times as I want. It looks not only for my public time line, but also for local tweets in Montreal (a very useful feature) and searches for tweets based on some keywords.
- A weather application that basically gives today's forecast in the morning and tomorrow forecast in the afternoon. As I needed much more information than that , I again wrote a custom application based on Yahoo's weather feed.
- A reminder application, that can be used to keep track of daily appointments or just to make sure not to miss your favorite TV shows. This application worked well until recently when it just stopped reminding me of anything whatsoever.
- An email notifier application, that I did not try.
- An RSS feeds reader application, that does not work that well.
- Some radio and audio podcasts applications. Most of these radio stations never played for me. One of them, the France Info station, played at the specified times, alas whenever it played, I had to reboot the bunny afterwords in order to resume normal operation.
The API Fortunately, the Nabaztag comes with an easy restful API. This API offers many services including, in order of relevance:
- A text to speech service. This is the backbone of the API as it makes writing all the Nabaztag 3rd party applications possible.
- A play audio service that tells the bunny to play some audio file. Very useful if you intend to write applications that will play your favorite podcasts at some specific times.
- Some miscellaneous services to check whether the bunny is awake, to get all available language-voice pairs...(The Nabaztag is multilingual, mind you).
Social Networks Features Violet's web site has a bunny search feature that allows your rabbit to connect with friends. I have not tried any of these features yet. Verdict In all, I like my bunny. I am using it more like a personal assistant. I keep writing new applications for my rabbit. So far, Agatha (that's my bunny's name) is able to give me weather conditions (current and forecasts, non-deterministically, depending on two probability matrices), read tweets, suggest new songs for me and tell me some cycling statistics. My next application will be a librarian that will alert me whenever I have some books to return to the library. I think that Nabaztag is a great piece of hardware. On the other hand, the applications provided on Violet's web site are very unreliable and really need to be improved. Maybe, Violet should open its repository to external contributors. This product is not for everybody. You will take the most of it if you know how to program it.