Oh look another Ai scam trying to make money off emotionally vulnerable people.
Oh, it will let us do the thing we already do if we take the time to learn common behaviors and actually pay attention?
Oh good, at least they spoke to someone who knows what they are talking about.
“But AI often generates made-up responses that please the user rather than being anchored in objective reality. This could be a disaster if applied to pets’ welfare,” said Birch, whose input to the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act led to it being expanded to include cephalopod mollusks and decapod crustaceans.
Birch points to separation anxiety: dog owners often want reassurance that their pet is not suffering when left alone for long periods. Futuristic “translation” apps based on large language models could promise to provide that reassurance, but end up causing harm by telling owners what they want to hear rather than what the animal actually needs.
AI isn’t needed, dogs and cats can be trained to use sound buttons to express complex thoughts and emotions. IIRC, they can have a vocabulary of something like 100-200 words used commonly in the household.
Your pets already understand you and a lot of what you say. You may just not understand them, and AI isn’t going to fix that.
Or do the dogs/cats train the humans with those buttons? ;)
The pets do need the training to understand that the sounds, when the button says them, mean communication to the human. It’s actually a pretty sophisticated intellectual jump, and not all pets necessarily get it.
Typically one starts with “outside” as a non-food common request (for indoor peta). So an owner starts by saying “outside” and associating just that word with going outside (not the full “you wanna go out?”). Once the pet gets past the conceptual hurdle is the button means the thing, after that it’s much easier to add new words.
