Will it soon be possible to translate dog barking?
Seattle - Dog owners are familiar with the situation: their pet barks for seemingly no reason and you wonder what the four-legged friend could possibly mean. But this will soon be a thing of the past. An AI system makes it possible!
Who wouldn't want to know what's going on in their pet's head?
A device will soon make it possible to translate the barking of dogs.
As the New York Times reports, a dog camera is to introduce a new function that can distinguish between different types of barking.
As soon as a dog's behavior appears unusual, its owner will be informed via push notification.
Andrew Bleiman, General Manager of Tomofun, the company that manufactures the device, explained the benefits of the system to NYT:
"So we can tell you not only that your dog is barking, but if your dog is howling or whining or barking frantically, and basically send you a true emergency alert."
The animal's activity can be used to determine its well-being
To develop the new function, the company had analyzed thousands of video data: "If you have a camera staring at a dog all day and listening to dogs all day, the amount of data is simply enormous."
Tomofun is even able to refine the data by breed or size of dog, Bleiman reports: "I can tell you, for example, that on average, a Newfoundland barks four times a day, at least as much as our camera records, and a husky barks 36 times a day."
Petcube is another company trying to decode animal behavior.
Yaroslav Azhnyuk, CEO and co-founder of the company, is confident that artificial intelligence will help pet owners to better understand the behavior of their pets: "We have started to use algorithms to understand the behavior of pets and what they might be saying or how they are feeling." For example, an animal's activity can be used to determine whether it is ill.
There are now similar products for cats and the market continues to grow.
Experts are certain that future technology will focus more than ever on the well-being of pets.