The tech teaching dogs to ‘talk’

In 2019, Stella, a dog in the US, shot to internet fame for her ability to “talk”. By pawing at a soundboard made up of large circular buttons, each dictating a different word, she makes loose sentences like “Stella, want, go, outside”, and “bed, all done, come, outside”. 

Other owners caught on, and a “talking dog” movement was born. 

While the tech is still in its infancy, here are the innovations teaching dogs to “talk”.

Paw-sized buttons 

Speech pathologist Christina Hunger, Stella’s owner, was inspired by the work she had done with non-verbal children. After she adopted Stella, Hunger noticed that her pet was communicating in a similar way to toddlers before they started to talk. 

At work, Hunger used alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) devices, such as speech-generating tablets, to help non-verbal children communicate. She reasoned she could do something similar with Stella using paw-sized buttons. 

“I asked myself: If dogs can understand the words we say to them, why can’t they say words back? [...] I knew dogs couldn't use verbal speech, but I wondered what would happen if they had a different way to say words.

“I adapted a product designed for children to create my own communication device for Stella and I spent time teaching her words, just like I did at work,” she says. Stella’s vocabulary grew and before long she was forming short sentences.

As other owners followed Hunger’s lead, she turned her blog, Hunger for Words, into a business, selling sets of low-cost buttons. Owners can record different words like “play” or “hungry” onto each one, and secure them on the floor with a mat. Hunger also provides teaching guides and has written a book to help owners with training. 

The soundboards aren't just a gimmick, Hunger says. She believes they can alleviate a pet’s anxiety and frustration at being misunderstood.

“You know that moment when you’re sitting on your couch and your dog is staring at you whining and you’re trying to figure out why? That’s exactly what the buttons solve,” she says. “Our dogs’ needs and thoughts are incredibly complex, and buttons serve as an outlet for them.” 

Do dogs really understand language? 

There is some evidence that dogs can understand human language. In 2011, a study found a border collie named Chaser had learnt the names of more than 1,000 toys in three years of training, showing linguistic skills that, the researchers noted, were  “normally attributed to children”. 

But are the internet’s “talking dogs” simply responding to conditioning and their owner’s body language, as sceptics suggest? 

Hunger’s work has prompted new investigations into those questions. In August, a University of California study concluded that pets trained to use soundboards can understand certain words and respond appropriately to them — for instance, by running to the door when they hear the word “outside”. The study showed that dogs responded in the same way to words regardless of who said them — suggesting that they aren’t simply responding to an owner’s prompts. 

“Our findings are important because they show that words matter to dogs, and that they respond to the words themselves, not just to associated cues,” says the study’s lead researcher Federico Rossano, a cognitive scientist.

What is striking, says Hunger, is that Stella doesn’t just use buttons to make requests. She recalls watering her plants one day, when Stella left her room to press her “water” button. 

“She was saying ‘water’ simply to comment on what was happening,” Hunger says. She notes that dogs have so far been shown to use their buttons to describe and comment, as well as to protest, request and ask and answer questions. 

“I see a world in which it’s standard for all pet homes to have at least a few buttons for dogs to be able to communicate their needs,” Hunger says. “With over 65m households with at least one dog in the US, and over 750m households with dogs worldwide, the talking pet industry is in its infancy and is bursting with potential.”

A talking collar

Others are taking a different approach to pet communication. A smart collar called Shazam is designed to let pets “talk” to their owners, much like the dogs in the movie ‘Up’. In this case, though, it is the collar, not the pet, that is using language, creating the illusion of a conversation.  

John McHale set up the brand — part of his larger company, Personifi AI — in Texas after his dog, Roscoe, was bitten by a rattlesnake. It was hours before McHale realised what had happened, by which time Roscoe was critically ill. 

“He survived, but it got me thinking: what if his collar could have detected the rattlesnake encounter? We would have known right away that it had happened,” he recalls.  

Shazam’s AI-powered collar is fitted with a microphone and a speaker. When owners talk to their pets, the collar’s chatbot responds in one of dozens of pre-recorded human voices, each with different personas. 

One of the collar’s functions is to offer “empathic interactions”. Using what McHale calls “empathic AI”, developed by teams in the US and Ukraine, the collar can identify an owner’s mood and respond appropriately. 

“It can interpret how the human is feeling, based on what a human is saying, or their tone of voice. It brings what we call a limbic response: an emotional response,” he says. A pet (in reality, the collar) could appear to console an owner when they are sad or share in their happiness. 

The collar, which is sold B2C through a subscription service, also rolls together many of the functions offered by other wearable products. 

“It’s wedded to deep learning and AI, and involves a really profound leap of features,” says McHale, adding the collar can monitor everything from a pet’s movement and vital signs to its location and food consumption. It’s designed to prompt owners to feed or walk their animals if they have forgotten, and to detect illnesses, based on changes to behaviour or routine. If a pet is distressed, the collar will alert the owner. The same applies if it is kidnapped or locked in a car. 

Like Halo, another American startup, Shazam also serves as a “virtual leash”, alerting a pet if it has strayed too far. 

“We listen for traffic. If a pet is lost and is approaching traffic, we have developed a turnaround sequence that causes the pet to hesitate and starts to drive them back home,” McHale says. “It doesn’t shock the dog. It uses various frequencies and the owner’s voice to say: ‘You’ve gone too far’.” 

Of course, these capabilities require vast amounts of data. 

“With our technology, we listen to the dog and its environment. All the data that we’re picking up in the environment is processed using machine learning. Each pet has a unique cognitive ability in the cloud — or, if you will, a brain — which is interpreting this behaviour,” McHale explains. For those capabilities, the collars start at almost $500, plus annual fees. 

Is the technology likely to catch on? 

Some investors have expressed caution about pet wearables, arguing that the offline component of pet ownership is part of the appeal. 

But McHale thinks differently. 

“We’re finding that people enjoy empathic interactions with their pets. It really enhances the bond between people and pets,” says McHale. “This is really about wellbeing not only for the pet, but for the human as well.”