[dasickis]

We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand.

A few things we observed: 1. Dogs are more communicative once they believe you are correctly responsive to their vocalizations 2. Their barks are more differentiated over time and they start to introduce new types of vocalizations or sequences of vocalizations 3. Dogs don't have a structured vocal language as it starts of slightly differentiated and mostly to get people's attention

This isn't true for other animals (based on our reading of academic papers) and a commonality we've seen in the papers: as animals have more individuals they interact with across their life especially not directly related, their vocalizations are more structured. Within family units they tend to rely more on touch, body language, and some intermittent vocalizations. Though marine mammals are very vocal given they operate within acoustic environments in the ocean and it gets dark around 100m - 200m.

Basically, as number of sustained individuals in a group goes up and the number of non-related individuals increases, vocalizations get more diverse. We see cows, pigs, goats, and other herd animals are also very vocal which is how scientists have been decoding their speech recently similar to prairie dogs.

Much of what I've written here is a super simplification but happy to get deeper into the weeds.

[MagicMoonlight]

We had an old dog move in with us and it’s been interesting because it has developed a new dog culture based on my existing dog. It now barks when someone comes home, barks to go outside etc. It didn’t do any of that before but it has started doing it by watching the existing dog communicate and having people who are more attentive to its needs.

Everything I see in dogs suggests that they are sentient, they just don’t seem to need language. They speak when it is useful, like for getting attention from people in different rooms, but they don’t really need it beyond that. So they don’t go any further.

[pxc]

If you ever deliberately raise a puppy, you'll watch the formation of many communication patterns that you create both deliberately (like barking or ringing a bell to go outside) and by accident.

The more I learn about domesticated animals, the more impressed I am by their intelligence and attunement to humans, natural and learned.

[vidarh]

> Everything I see in dogs suggests that they are sentient, they just don’t seem to need language. They speak when it is useful, like for getting attention from people in different rooms, but they don’t really need it beyond that. So they don’t go any further.

If you haven't check out whataboutbunny [1] on Instagram to get an indication of how far dogs can go when given an opportunity. Bunny is trained to use buttons to "speak". A lot of it is very simple and functional ("outside", "play") that could easily be handled by body language and the odd bark, but occasionally you get fairly complex conversations which seems to indicate introspection and fairly complex reasoning that as you say they "just don't seem to need" to be able to express in language in normal conditions.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/whataboutbunny/

[tlavoie]

I do chuckle at one of mine, who definitely has a range of meanings to her barks. One solitary "WOOF", repeated at an interval means, "I'm stuck in the paddock, please let me out." She has another for "I've got a raccoon up a tree," and a gruff huffing noise for, "get off your ass and take us for a walk!"

I'm pretty sure I'm at least as much the trainee as the trainer here though.

[pxc]

> We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand.

Can most dog owners not already understand or differentiate their dogs' barks? I can tell from the quality and context of my dog's barks, whether he

  - wants something (food, water, attention)
  - is angry
  - is scared
  - wants to play
  - is excited
  - is voicing a territorial dispute

and I think most dog people can also be confident in interpreting a fair range of basic emotions and also perhaps unique behaviors they've accidentally trained or organically developed with their dogs.

What additional things can your tech detect or identify beyond stuff like that? Are you using AI with human coders on training data, and if so, do they need special training or is the wisdom of naive dog-adjacent crowds good enough here?

I thought the other info you shared about canine and other animal vocalizations was very cool and interesting. I'd love to learn more about that any time, from anyone!

[gregoriol]

While maybe not very useful, it would be fun to have a real translation of dogs (and other animals). I have a lot of questions that I'd like them to answer.

[LoganDark]

In order to translate language, the animal has to be speaking language. That is, they have to be putting some sort of emotion or indicator into their vocalizations that would be able to be decoded in the first place.

There's a channel on YouTube called BilliSpeaks where someone trained their cat to be able to press buttons to speak. The cat can answer questions, communicate feelings and even have conversations with the help of their translator, but only because they were trained on how to use it.

[gregoriol]

What about communication between animals?

[LoganDark]

My cats heavily use body language and physical activity to communicate with each other, rather than explicit vocalization. Their body language is passive, and their physical activity is indicative (and usually, so are their vocalizations); they don't exactly directly communicate concepts like human language does.

It would be nice if it were translatable, though.

[pxc]

I wonder if pets in households with those talking buttons ever use them to communicate with each other, or if they never choose to because it's so much less efficient than natural conspecific communication for most of the things they would want to 'talk' about.

One use case I could see is storytelling, specifically to share events that one of the animals was not present for.

In my house, my dogs usually seem to 'communicate' by calling the other's attention, and then observing the same thing together. Maybe they'd like to tell stories for some of the things that one of them misses.

[dasickis]

That's exactly right so you can expand the vocabulary of animals especially dogs with training similar to how they train dogs to press buttons. This research is much more extensive with captive dolphins and now we're seeing the same with domesticated animals.

[oesexe]

Speaking of Dogs and Human interaction: I remember a study stating that wolfs lack a certain muscle, which dogs have. A muscle above the eye; believed to be directly linked to dogs’ long time interaction with humans.

[JoeAltmaier]

The Husky is also missing this. Thus their strange staring appearance.

[r0rshrk]

Please please write an article on this. There's not information online about canine communication

[croo]

Can't we just train an LLM with lots of recorded sound of whale song then let it produce the most probable whale song response given a context?

Then we can just ask the LLM to translate the same whale song to english.

(I would dismiss trying this with dogs as in my experience they communication channels revolve more around touch and smells than barking)