Violet Karotz review

You’ll primarily use voice commands to interact with Karotz – it works rather well, although it’s quite odd to find yourself going to some pains to enunciate clearly into the head of a plastic rabbit. Karotz’ voice recognition is good enough to take dictation of Facebook and Twitter posts and recognise song titles when you request them. We did find that the voice-controlled MP3 player had trouble hearing us when it was actually playing music; fortunately, there’s an alternative app called MiniPlay which allows you to navigate through your music collection by moving Karotz’s ears.

A low-resolution and poor-quality camera means you can use Karotz as an IP camera, while a mobile app for Android and iOS lets you control the rabbit’s ears, activate the webcam, stream music to Karotz from your mobile device or make it speak. An application called At Home sends an email to the address of your choice – with an optional shot from the webcam – when someone activates the app by voice command or by swiping an RFID tag; perfect for letting the family know you’ve arrived home safely.

These flat Karotz-shaped RFID tags, called Flatnanoz, are designed to clip to your keying. These are blank to begin with, and Karotz can program them to launch a certain app when you swipe them in front of the rabbit’s belly. Karotz comes with two Flatnanoz, and you can buy more for £4.49 each. There are also tiny model Karotz RFID tags, which are £5.99 each. Replacement ears and decorative decals are also available.

Karotz is cute and both its free app-based features and properly-translated website are a big improvement on those of the original Nabaztag. It’s still a cute novelty item rather than something that’s genuinely useful, but it’s a particularly fun way to interact with your social media. At £79, it isn’t insanely expensive and it’s fun, useful and well-designed enough to mean that you’re more likely to keep using it than you are to leave it in a dark cupboard after a week or so. However, amusing though it is, an interactive rabbit-shaped helper robot probably isn’t on most people’s priority purchase list.