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Researchers aim to translate dog sounds using artificial intelligence – Orlando Sentinel
By Myriam Fawzia, Dallas Morning News
DALLAS – Have you ever wondered what your dog is trying to say? Well, a researcher at the University of Texas at Arlington aims to turn the barks, howls and whines of man’s best friend into intelligible speech — a kind of Rosetta Stone of woof.
Computer world Kenny Chu He has built what he says is the world’s largest video and audio catalog of dog sounds. In papers published this yearZhou and his colleagues at the university have pointed to potential phonemes – the smallest units of sound – and word-like patterns that could one day be transformed into full sentences intelligible to humans.
“The ultimate goal is to create a translator through which you can speak freely with your pet,” said Zhu, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Texas Arlington. “We can already make instantaneous connections between human languages. Perhaps in the future we can do the same with animals.”
Artificial intelligence explains the dog
Humans have long wanted to talk to animals, and in the last century scientists have tried: Who Teaching great apes sign language and English to bottlenose dolphins.
Zhou’s fascination with animal communication began in Nanjing, China, where he spent his childhood surrounded by dogs, ducks, chickens and the occasional hedgehog. He often wondered what animals said to each other, although his curiosity subsided over time.
It wasn’t until decades later, when he was watching a BBC documentary about communication between whales and dolphins, that questions from his childhood came up again. The documentary showed how difficult it is to record and decode whale and dolphin exchanges. But with artificial intelligence, Zhu believes there must be an easier way to translate animal speech. With his background in natural language processing and AI development, he felt up to the task.
For his first project, Cho wanted to see if a linguistic model could hear the difference between Shiba Inus in Japan and the United States. He and his colleagues mined videos of dogs posted on YouTube to test. After detecting no split in the dogs’ dialect, Zhou and his colleagues collected hundreds of hours of simultaneous audio and video to train an AI model to separate dog sounds into separate sounds.
Decoding pronunciation includes both sounds and Context, Chu said, is that a dog’s barking or whining may be related to its situation. If the term corresponds to a dog’s activity, this association indicates a possible meaning.
So far, researchers have transcribed about 50 hours of barking into syllables. They identified some possible words, such as cat, cage, and leash, and how these words sound different based on the breed of dog. They also identified how a dog’s linguistic ability appears to change as he gets older. In one study, Zhou and his colleagues found that as huskies age, their bark lasts longer and may become more developed.
Dr. Doolittle at your fingertips
This effort isn’t just about chatting with Fido like your next-door neighbor: It can also help identify early clues about your dog’s health, Chu said. If a dog experiences any mental or physical changes, a smartphone app or other device with a canine translator can notify the owner.
To achieve a similar goal, Chu is working on decoding cats. He is drafting a proposal to the Morris Animal Foundation to conduct a study investigating whether cat sounds can provide insight into their mental state or behavior.
Another of Chu’s projects, with Texas A&M University, is processing livestock sounds. Dozens of cows were recorded in the university’s monitored barns 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with audio and video, for more than two months. The data will be compared to the animals’ veterinary records to see how it relates to their health.
Zhou and his collaborators hypothesize that small talk among the herd may carry signals about the well-being of the cows. By analyzing these phonetic patterns of linguistic structure, they hope to detect disease before a person sees a sick cow.
They’re not the only ones using artificial intelligence to decode animal speech. At the University of Michigan, researchers did just that Treating dog barking using artificial intelligence models Originally trained on human speech, at Virginia Tech, scientists are building an artificial intelligence system to Deciphering cow sounds. Meanwhile, a cottage industry AI powered dog collars and “Cat Translator” applications. This service has emerged, promising users the ability to better understand their pets’ needs.
Myriam Fawzia is a science reporting fellow at the Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas. The News makes all editorial decisions.
©2025 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
From barks to words: Researchers aim to translate dog sounds with AI
