There’s been a lot of talk about technology that can help us understand what our pets are saying to us (or about us) in recent years, but we haven’t cracked the code of talking to animals just yet. Animals might understand us, but we can’t really know what each excited bark or indifferent meow means.
Recent research has shown that dogs can “talk” with the help of buttons placed on the ground, each playing a different word. At least one such dog has gone viral on social media in recent years for its ability to answer human questions and form simple sentences using those buttons.
But that’s not the same as understanding what pets are trying to say. Instead, we might be developing tech that lets some animals “talk.” Even then, they can only form very simple sentences using whatever buttons they can press with a paw.
What might actually help us understand what animals are saying in real time is AI, and one Chinese tech giant thinks it has the technology to one day offer tools that interpret barks and meows as they happen around you.
Baidu, which has been making notable progress with ChatGPT-like models in recent years, submitted a patent to the China National Intellectual Property Administration in December proposing AI technology for translating animal messages.
I usually say that tech in patent applications doesn’t always make it to commercial products, and the same goes for Baidu’s proposed AI solution to translate animal sounds into words we can understand.
Maybe the Chinese giant is onto something, or maybe not. What’s interesting here is the patent itself. Filing such a document means Baidu thinks it may have discovered something meaningful.
According to South China Morning Post, the Chinese patent authority just published the application publicly on Tuesday.
The document explains how Baidu’s AI might go about translating what pets are saying into human words. First, the AI collects a lot of information, which is how any AI model starts. You need to train it with data before it can produce useful results.
The AI would observe the target animal and gather information from its behavior, including “voice, body language, behavioural changes, and other biological signs.” Of course, pets won’t have the same privacy rights we expect when it comes to internet services and AI collecting data about us.
Once it has the data, Baidu’s AI would try to determine the animal’s emotion, then attempt to convert it into human language. If the voice doesn’t match any emotional record, the team would manually label the data.
Baidu’s AI tech would rely on several areas of AI, including machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. These technologies would allow the system to process large data sets and learn from them. The AI would analyze the voice and movements of the animals, then turn that behavior into human speech by generating an AI voice for the animal.
If the technology works, it might still be a while before it’s available. But if it does work, I can see how easy it could be to implement. Companies like Baidu might develop AI apps specifically designed to help pets talk.
“There has been a lot of interest in the filing of our patent application,” a Baidu spokesperson told Reuters. “Currently, it is still in the research phase.”
Imagine using a mobile app that gives the AI access to your camera. You’d point it at your dog or cat, and the model, which was already pretrained on lots of pet data, would recognize their barks and meows, and maybe even their moods. The app might then turn those sounds into spoken words.
Another possibility is that the AI could record your pet’s sounds and behavior for a final round of training before translating them. Of course, this is just speculation.
The good news is it’ll be easy to tell if the tech works. Once researchers start figuring out what pets are trying to say and meeting their needs, pets will give immediate feedback. I’m pretty sure even cats will be impressed, no matter how nonchalant they act. Any successful back-and-forth involving barks, meows, and human words would prove the AI works. I do expect limitations, of course — fish and mice might be out of luck.
It’ll also be interesting to see if Baidu gets a patent for the animal translation AI it’s trying to protect. I’m sure other AI labs around the world have had similar ideas. It’s just a matter of time before one of them creates AI tech that lets us understand what animals are saying.
While we wait, check out Sapphie the Pomsky on Instagram. She’s a very good girl who’s so smart, she can use buttons to communicate.
