Computer Program Could Translate Dog Barks Into Human Speech
Sat, 2008-02-02 09:17 — Hans
By Brandon Keim
January 16, 2008 | 12:57:50 PM
Hungarian researchers have written a program that explains the meaning of dogs' barks.
The software is still a bit buggy, but it's promising enough to suggest that computers could one day translate not only between humans, but between species.
For a study scheduled to be published this week in Animal Cognition, researchers from Eötvös Loránd University developed algorithms to analyze the acoustic features of dog barks. Then they recorded 14 Hungarian sheepdogs barking 6,000 times in a variety of situations—greeting a stranger, picking a fight and so on.
Their program correctly classified 43 percent of the barks—not exactly a staggering accuracy rate, but better than most humans achieve by sound alone. (Reassuringly, it was particularly good at tagging 'fight' barks.) It was also able to identify the individual dog behind each bark about half the time—again not an overwhelming number, but better than people can do with dogs from the same breed.
Wrote the researchers, “The use of advanced machine learning algorithms to classify and analyze animal sounds opens new perspectives for the understanding of animal communication."
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Amazing
This is absolutely amazing. What will happen next? I sure would love to be able to communicate more with my dog.
George_L
Other species
I think it will be even more interesting to understand animals better to which we cannot get as close, for various reasons, as to dogs. I believe somebody who lives with a dog can understand him pretty well without the help of special technology.
Some animals, for example, whales, dolphins, and elephants, communicate in sounds we cannot even hear easily, much less understand. Moreover, these are wild animals that are not usually intent on communicating with us humans. Technology may help to solve this problem.
Computer sound analysis is already used to analyze elephant communications, though not to the degree described above, but I hope the technology can be developed further.
Dogspeak
The cover article of this month's National Geographic addresses this subject also.
Thanks for the info
Perhaps one day we'll be able to use a similar device to listen in on elephant conversations.