There were people I’ve been trying to talk to animals since we learned to form words. Nowadays, we look to technology for solutions – giving our dogs talking buttons to catch, or trying to exploit artificial intelligence to aid us understand whales.
The newest and perhaps most direct approach to human-animal communication is the voice-activated collar, which gives your pet the ability to speak to you. Or at least that’s the idea.
John McHale, a self-proclaimed “tech guy” living in Austin, Texas, has a company called Personifi AI. The startup’s goal, as its name suggests, is to create technology that “embodies everything,” as McHale puts it. For now, the first step is animals.
There is a loudspeaker on the company’s collar; talk to your pet (actually talk to the collar) and you’ll hear a recorded human voice that responds to you, creating the illusion that your pet has a human personality and can speak English. The collar is currently only for cats and dogs, but McHale hopes it will make its way to wearables for other creatures and eventually humans.
McHale came up with the idea for the talking collar after his dog Roscoe was bitten by a rattlesnake. McHale didn’t realize what had happened at first until a few hours later when Roscoe started looking very bad. Don’t worry, Roscoe was alive and well now, but he had to spend 10 days in an animal hospital, which likely resulted in a hefty vet bill. The harrowing close call stuck with McHale and he began to wonder how things could have turned out differently. Could he have helped Roscoe sooner if the dog had been able to tell him what happened? This is how the idea of Shazam was born.
To talk!
Oh yes, it’s called a collar Shazamalthough it has no connection with any superhero cinema or very well known music discovery service of the same name. Shazam (for pets) has both a microphone and a voice box inside, so it hears your voice and responds with its own voice. The idea is to make owners feel like they’re talking to their pet when they’re actually talking to a chatbot on the collar.
“We start with states of being,” McHale says. “We measure all sorts of things about humans, animals and the world. All of these variables fundamentally persist and change and are inputs to what we call the cognitive cortex, which we build based on machine learning and big data.
This kind of world-building for your pet won’t come cheap. Collar prices start at $495 for cats and $595 for dogs. There are also subscription fees – $195 a year for cat collars and “ultra” or $295 a year for the BrainBoost service, which a Shazam representative says “is what gives you all the truly sentient qualities like empathy, reasoning, social skills” awareness and self-awareness.” Both of these subscription fees are waived for the first year, but will automatically renew after one year. Without a BrainBoost subscription, the band reverts to generic voice and loses its energetic properties, so if you want the best experience, you must continue to pay the $295 annual fee after the first (free) year ends.