Introducing Bobby, our new Pebble assistant
I’m excited to announce a new Rebble service for our paying Rebble subscribers: Bobby, a voice assistant app for your Pebble!
Bobby is available from the Rebble Appstore now! You can also check out its webpage.
Bobby is a new voice assistant for your Pebble. It’s inspired by Snowy, but powered by modern AI technology (specifically, Google’s Gemini LLM). This makes Bobby both easier to use and more powerful than Snowy: no longer do you need to phrase your requests exactly.
Features
Weather
You can ask Bobby for the weather!
Timers
Bobby can set timers for you!
You can even have multiple timers at once, with different names!
Alarms
Bobby can do alarms, too!
As with timers, you can have multiple alarms set at once, and you can name them individually if you like.
Reminders
Bobby can remind you to do something in the future by putting a pin on your Pebble’s timeline (as well as keeping a list in the app).
Calculations and Conversions
Need some numbers numbered? Bobby can help with that!
Trivia
Bobby can answer many different types of question:
Bobby doesn’t have a knowledge cutoff date - in most cases, Bobby can look up current information to a answer your questions.
Feedback
Bobby is a new project, and we’re excited to hear what you think! If you have any feedback, please let us know. You can contact us on Discord, or directly through the app. The app gives you three ways to send feedback:
- From the main menu you can dictate feedback at any time
- From the conversation view, you can long-press to bring up a menu with a “Report” option to respond bad responses
- You can ask Bobby to send feedback to the developers (or any similar wording) - it’ll send feedback automatically
We’d love to hear what you think, how Bobby works for you, and any suggestions you have for improvements or new features!
Compatibility
Bobby is currently available for Pebble Time, Pebble Time Steel, and Pebble 2. Bobby will presumably also work on the upcoming Core 2 Duo and Core Time 2, but we’ll find that out in the future. Maybe Bobby will even gain the (optional!) ability to speak aloud!
The Pebble Time Round is not supported (but may be in the future - especially if there is demand!). The original Pebble and Pebble Steel don’t have microphones, so cannot be supported.
Bobby also currently does not support Cobble, Rebble’s work-in-progress replacement for the Pebble mobile app. Please don’t try to use it - bugs in Cobble cause many features of Bobby to misbehave. For the time being, Bobby works best with the official Pebble mobile apps.
Bonus: a dictation update for Pebble!
Alongside the launch of Bobby, we are introducing an experimental new feature for all Pebble dictation: you can now set your language to auto in the Pebble app’s voice language settings. This enables you to switch between dictation languages on the fly without needing to change settings all the time - handy for the multilingual among you! We also expect that dictation accuracy should be improved across the board.
Do note that, for short utterances (only a syllable or two), the “auto” setting may guess the wrong language. If you can’t see “auto” in your language list yet, it should show up eventually - or you can rerun boot to speed it along. As always, dictation requires a Rebble subscription.
We also now have a way to hear what your watch microphone sounds like, if you’re curious (or having problems) - if you have a Rebble subscription, turn on Audio Debug Mode on your account page and then visit the Audio Debug page to see your recorded audio. Audio debug mode will automatically turn off after 24 hours, and the recordings are deleted 24 hours after they’re taken. When audio debug mode is disabled (as it is by default), Rebble does not store either recordings or transcripts of your dictation requests.
Privacy
Every request you make to Bobby is passed to us, and then passed on to Google (twice, actually - first for speech recognition, and then for the LLM). Additional details are passed to other parties for certain requests.
We don’t store your requests long-term - they are deleted after a short period of time, currently ten minutes. We use the versions of Google’s APIs that do not store your data for training, and we don’t pass them any unique identifiers for you. Similarly, for other APIs, no context is provided as to who is making the request, and all requests are made via our servers.
There is an exception to this: if you report a thread (either from the long-press menu in the conversation view, or by asking Bobby to send feedback to us), that conversation will be stored and made available to the Rebble team for review.
Pricing
Bobby is included as part of your Rebble subscription! Why isn’t it free? Two reasons:
- You need to be a Rebble subscriber for dictation to work, and Bobby isn’t very useful without that
- Bobby uses a number of expensive APIs (for the LLM, weather, geolocation, POIs, etc.), which cost us money on each use.
Bobby imposes a monthly limit on usage to ensure a single user can’t force us to run up a huge bill. We don’t expect most users to hit this, but you can see how close you are to your monthly limit in the “Quota” screen in Bobby’s menu (hit ⋯ on the main screen to get there).
