Animal owners seeking a deeper understanding of their beloved Fido or Tiddles have new hope after a recently filed patent from Chinese search giant Baidu was unearthed by the South China Morning Post (SCMP). The Hong Kong-based organ reports that Baidu's patent seeks to translate animal communications leveraging machine and deep learning with a mix of inputs including "voice, body language, behavioral changes and other biological signs." However, this isn't quite Dr Doolittle 'talk to the animals' territory.
From our understanding of the details shared regarding Baidu's patent, it will rely on a multitude of inputs to deliver a human language rendering of an animal's current emotion. So, you aren't going to be using this AI tool for anything much more than recognizing whether your pet is hungry, or has some other pressing need. You weren't expecting to chat with your Burmese feline about geopolitics, were you?
It will be interesting to see any eventual applications based upon Baidu's work. We'd expect to be able to enjoy a wider gamut of 'conversation' with one of the intelligent dog breeds than a feline, caged bird, or fish friend. Of course, the machine learning will have to be rejigged for each species.
Previous and current smart device apps with touted 'animal translation' ability are said to be quite a popular phenomenon. The SCMP notes that a Japanese dog translation device (not app) was crowned one of the 'best inventions of 2002' by Time Magazine. However, some more recent and more sophisticated attempts at animal translators have fallen by the wayside.
Some of the most popular pet translator apps (Image credit: Future)
A quick look on my Android mobile for animal translation apps reveals that there are a multitude of these 'quack' apps (pun intended) currently available. Several of these apps, usually targeting either dogs or cats, have enjoyed tens of millions of downloads. However, they are almost universally badly rated (no surprise). If someone got this right, even with a little accuracy, we are sure the app(s) would be very lucrative.
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
i don't really care about talking to animals.... however this kind of thing seems like it could be used to understand potential changes in their health. Pretty much anyone that's had a sick pet has felt the frustration of not being able to simply ask them "what's wrong?"
I'd imagine this will rely on humans to properly label and classify the input data, so I doubt this will lead to any breakthroughs, but it should bring expert level knowledge down to a more accessible level.
