Gear up to talk to your pets in a common language soon

Woof-woof! Meow-meow! Any idea what it means? Or for that matter, whatever your dog or cat wishes to communicate to you through its barks? In another 10 years or so, you can clearly comprehend and talk back to your pet.

An interesting study report by online retail giant Amazon raises hopes that in that timespan the pet ‘language’ translation tool will come into fruition. What more, it would be available at stores – be it online or brick and mortar – for you and me to go buy, reckons the e-tailer.

The co-author of the study, futurologist William Higham of Next Big Thing, is ultra-confident that the futuristic technology still in the making is a realistic prospect as the pet market is on constant evolution over the past few years. “Innovative products that succeed are based around a genuine and major consumer needs. The amount of money now spent on pets – they are becoming fur babies to so many people – means there is huge consumer demand for this. Somebody is going to put this together.”

The study, it turns out, is based on another artificial intelligence research work by Con Slobodchikoff, Professor Emeritus, Biological Sciences department, Northern Arizona University to decode the calls of prairie dogs. That study discovered that the dogs under investigation had ‘a sophisticated communication system that has all the aspects of language’. “They have words for different species of predator and can describe the colour of clothes of a human, or the coat of coyotes or dogs.,” Slobodchikoff was quoted saying.

The upcoming translation technology is expected to involve machine learning algorithms and speech recognition software.

Get ready to converse to your pets in a lingua franca.