Rivian Assistant is coming to R2 in the October software update, Wassym confirmed on social media today, which closes one of the bigger gaps between R2 and the R1 fleet.
R2 launched without it. When the first R2 update went out in June, Assistant was among the features held back for a later OTA, while R1T and R1S owners have had it since 2026.15 back in May.
I spent a good amount of time with it on R1 for my hands-on review, where voice control felt more natural and texting by voice finally showed up. It had rough edges too, and the 2026.15.30 hotfix cleaned up a lot of them, from punctuation in dictated texts to quieter chimes.
That means R2 owners should get a more polished version than R1 owners did on day one. On R1 it’s tied to Connect+ or a trial and turning it on disables Alexa, so it’s worth checking your subscription before the update lands.
I’m most curious how the hardware changes things, since Wassym has said R2’s 200 sparse TOPS of Edge AI compute lets it run a local LLM, which should help with the lag some owners noticed on R1.
October is shaping up to be a big month for R2, with Pet Cam coming in the same update and Halloween coming early this year too.
I expect Assistant to feel snappier on my R2 than it does on my R1S, and I’ll share the full release notes with you all as soon as I get my hands on them.
