Humans have been Trying to talk to animals since we discovered how to form words. In modern times, we turn to technology for the solution: giving our dogs talking buttons to touch or trying to use artificial intelligence to help us understand whales.
The newest and perhaps most direct approach to human-animal communication is a voice-activated collar that gives your pet the power to respond to you. Or at least that’s the idea.
John McHale, a self-described “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 “epitomizes everything,” as McHale says. The first step, for now, is pets.
The company’s collar has a speaker; Talk to your pet (or, actually, talk to the collar) and you’ll hear a pre-recorded human voice responding to you, creating the illusion that your pet has a human personality and the ability to speak English. The collar is now only for dogs and cats, but McHale hopes to introduce wearable devices 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 did not realize what had happened at first until hours later, when Roscoe began to look very ill. Don’t worry, Roscoe lived and is fine now, but he had to spend 10 days in the animal hospital, a stay that presumably racked up a huge veterinary bill. That harrowing close call stayed with McHale, and he wondered how things could have been different. 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.
Talk!
Oh yes, the necklace is called shazamalthough it has no relation to the superhero cinema or the very well known music discovery service of the same name. Shazam (for pets) has a microphone and voice box inside, allowing him to hear your voice and respond with one of his own. The idea is to make owners feel like they are talking to their pet when they are actually talking to a chatbot in the collar.
“We start with states of being,” says McHale. “We measure all kinds of things about the human, the pet and the world. And all of those variables are essentially continuous and changing and are inputs to what we call the cognitive cortex, which we built and which is based on machine learning and large data sets.”
That kind of world-building for your pet won’t be cheap. Collars start at $495 for cats and $595 for dogs. There are also subscription fees: $195 a year for feline and “ultra” collars, or $295 a year for the BrainBoost service, which a Shazam representative says is “what brings together all the truly sentient qualities like empathy, reasoning and social relations. consciousness and self-awareness.” Both subscription fees are waived for the first year, but will automatically renew after one year. Without the BrainBoost subscription, the band reverts to a generic voice and loses its dynamic qualities, so if you want the best experience, you need to continue paying the $295 annual fee after the first (free) year ends.