Researchers have made a breakthrough by harnessing the power of AI models trained on human speech to essentially decode the secret language of dogs – and thanks to a recently published study, we can share the results!
The study, from researchers at the University of Michigan, Mexico’s National Institute of Astrophysics, and the Optics and Electronics Institute, tell us how today’s AI models could become the key to unlocking animal languages.
The results were presented last week at an international conference, and most notably the AI model trained on humans and dogs – with nearly 1,000 hours of human speech recordings – enabled researchers to identify a dog’s emotion with 62% accuracy, breed with 62% accuracy, gender with 69% accuracy, and identify a particular dog out of a bunch with 50% accuracy.
Interestingly, these scores far outperformed the AI model trained just purely on dogs, suggesting the sound and patterns derived from human speech could be key to better understanding other animals. I can see how that would make sense – after all, we’re just animals ourselves at the end of the day.
Rada Mihalcea, director of the University of Michigan’s AI Laboratory said in a press release:
There is so much we don’t yet know about the animals that share this world with us. Advances in AI can be used to revolutionize our understanding of animal communication, and our findings suggest that we may not have to start from scratch.
Mihalcea also spoke about the possibilities and potential next steps in this intriguing journey:
By using speech processing models initially trained on human speech, our research opens a new window into how we can leverage what we built so far in speech processing to start understanding the nuances of dog barks.
I love this news, and think understanding animals better could lead to a more empathic world – and dogs, being so vocal, are as good a place to start as any.
Although, now I’m imagining a world where all dogs go around talking like Dug from Up, and that’s probably not exactly what we can expect – but wouldn’t that be an interesting concept? Dogs could potentially become witnesses to crimes, for example – or am I overthinking?
Dogs can also be trained to use communication buttons, like Bunny the Dog, who already seems to communicate extremely well and is an account I’ve been following on TikTok for a couple of years now.
What do you think of this news about using AI to better understand dogs? If an AI translation became an option for you and your furry friend, would you buy it? Let me know… below.
