What Exactly is your Dog Trying to Say?

Have you ever wished to really know what your pet thinks? It is said that the master will always understand the body language of their pet and that some experts in this field can even translate what your dog or cat feels. But how can we know if our pets really feel or speak as we humans do?

Scandinavian scientists have created a device that translates the language of animals. The invention consisting of a set of sensors is called No more Woof and is placed on the dog’s head to register the electric signals coming from the animal’s brain. For example, certain types of signals were identified to show familiar emotions such as tiredness, hunger, curiosity and delight. The device uses encephalography to obtain a set of data that are subsequently analyzed by a micro-computer and emitted in human language through a speaker.

The Scandinavian researchers are going to create multiple voices with various accents, sound pitches and diverse vocabulary, thus customizing the device to enable the masters to choose the most adequate voice for their dogs’ breed or personality.

In fact, the general device can only process basic thoughts and emotions, but the team of scientists intends to create more advanced versions that are able to show various characteristics such as a personalized color matching the dog’s coat color or a mini speaker hidden in the golden identification plate. One significant characteristic of this device is its capacity to continue to learn, enabling the formulation of increasingly more complex sentences.

Obviously, the most attractive aspect is precisely the unpredictable situations, because all dog owners already have a pretty good capacity of detecting what their dogs think based on non-verbal signals such as look, tail movements, behavior and sounds. Researchers also suggest that a possible uncensored edition of No more Woof would probably put dog owners in some embarrassing situations in the dog off-leash areas.

But no translation can be considered complete if it does not work both ways. The Scandinavian researchers intend to make mutual communication possible in future, imagining that one day people will be able to express themselves in dog language, dolphin language or the language of any other animal. It will certainly be a more interesting world!