Chinese tech giant Baidu recently patented a system that uses artificial intelligence to decode animal sounds, like cat meows and dog barks. It’s a lot like how Google is currently trying to understand dolphin sounds using AI, or how a team of researchers is decoding cuttlefish sign language.
Mentally prepare yourself, because it appears the next frontier for humans isn’t deep space colonization, it’s having a chat with a dog.
Filed with China’s National Intellectual Property Administration, Baidu’s patent aims to foster “deeper emotional communication” between humans and pets. They want to build a machine that tells you when your cat is hungry, bored, or just plotting your demise. It’s still in the research phase, so who knows if any of their work will ever see the light of day.
This Company Wants to Use AI To Talk To Pets
There are currently tons of apps in your phone’s App Store that claim to translate a dog’s bark or a cat’s meow into human language. They are all full of shit; just a bunch of code assembled to pray on our inherit desire to understand just what a dog’s bark really means.
So, it makes sense that Baidu wouldn’t be the only company out there trying to harness the tech buzzword of the day, artificial intelligence, to try to speak to animals.
Not only is Google getting in on the fun, as mentioned above, but U.S.-based nonprofit Earth Species Project is out here trying to decode birdsong, dolphin squeaks, and elephant rumbles using AI.
Meanwhile, NatureLM, another nonprofit, just secured $17 million to build animal language models. A team involved in a project called CETI is using AI to understand how sperm whales communicate.
We are either witnessing the first baby steps of interspecies communication or tons of VC funding that’s going to disappear into thin air as these companies fold one after another if their projects fail to materialize any promising human-to-animal translators that an investor can patent and sell.
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