New AI should let you talk to your dog

Talk to your dog thanks to AI

“This is the first time that techniques optimized for human language have been used to decode animal communication,” explains Rada Mihalcea, head of the AI ​​​​lab at the University of Michigan.

For their study, the researchers from the University of Michigan collaborated with the Mexican Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE) in Puebla.

Since there was hardly any usable data for training the AI, the researchers repurposed an existing model that was originally intended to analyze human language.

“By using language processing models originally trained on human language, our research opens a new window into how we can use what we have built so far in language processing to understand the nuances of dog barking,” said Mihalcea.

According to the study results, it is quite possible to use sounds and patterns derived from human language as a basis for the analysis of animal sounds.

The study comes to these conclusions

In their study, the researchers were able to use their AI system to determine various parameters of a dog's bark. The training data used sounds from 74 dogs of different breeds, ages and genders.

This made it possible, among other things, to filter out whether a bark expressed playfulness or aggression. But the AI ​​model Wav2Vec2 was also able to determine age, breed and gender.

The researchers were able to achieve an accuracy of up to 70 percent. According to the researchers, Wav2Vec2 has already surpassed other models that are specifically trained to detect dog barking.

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