This talking pet collar is like a Chatbot for your dog

Humans have trying to talk to animals since we figured out how to form words. In modern times, we look to technology for solutions—giving our dogs talking buttons to pet or try to use. artificial intelligence to help us understand whales.

The newest and perhaps most direct approach to human-animal communication is the voice-activated collar that gives your pet the ability to talk back 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 can “humanize things,” as McHale puts it. The first step now is to get a pet.

The company’s collar has a speaker on it; 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-like personality. people and English speaking ability. Collars are currently only available for dogs and cats, but McHale hopes to use wearable devices on other creatures and eventually humans.

McHale came up with the idea for a talking collar after his dog Roscoe was bitten by a rattlesnake. McHale did not initially realize what had happened until several hours later when Roscoe began to appear unwell. Don’t worry, Roscoe is now alive and stable, but he spent 10 days in the veterinary hospital, a stay that probably racked up a large veterinary bill. That painful close call stayed with McHale, and he wondered how things could have turned out differently. Could he have helped Roscoe sooner if the dog could tell him what happened? So the idea of ​​Shazam was born.

Talk!

Oh yes, the collar is called Shazameven though it has nothing to do with superheroes movie or very famous music discovery service same name. Shazam (for pets) has both an internal microphone and voice box, allowing it to hear your voice and respond with its own voice. The idea is to make owners feel like they are chatting with their pets when in fact they are talking to a chatbot on the collar.

“We start with a state of being,” McHale said. “We measure everything about people, about pets and about the world. And all of those variables are essentially ongoing and changing, and are inputs into what we call the cognitive cortex, which we build on machine learning and large data sets. ”

That kind of world-building for your pets won’t come cheap. Collars start at $495 for cats and $595 for dogs. There are also subscription fees—$195 a year for the “super” cat and collar, or $295 a year for the BrainBoost service, which Shazam reps say is “the one that brings all the real qualities to the table.” sentient abilities such as empathy, reasoning, and sociality”. awareness and self-awareness.” Both of these subscription fees are waived for the first year but will automatically renew after one year. Without a BrainBoost subscription, the band will revert to a generic voice and lose its dynamic quality, so if you want the best experience, you must continue to pay the $295 annual fee after the first year (it’s free). fee) ends.