Humans have been trying to talk to animals since we discovered how to form words. In modern times, we turn to technology for the solution: give our dogs talking buttons or try to use artificial intelligence to help us understand whales.
The newest and perhaps most direct approach to human-animal communication is a voice-activated collar that gives your pet the power to talk back to you. Or at least, that’s the idea.
John McHale, a self-described “tech guy” based in Austin, Texas, has a company called Personifi AI. The startup’s goal, as its name suggests, is to create technology that “personifies everything,” as McHale puts it. The first step, for now, is pets.
The neck of the company has a speaker; talk to your pet (or, really, talk to the collar) and you’ll hear a pre-recorded human voice respond, creating the illusion that your pet has a human personality and the ability to speak English. The collar is only for cats and dogs, but McHale hopes to get into wearable devices for other creatures and eventually humans.
McHale got the idea for the talking collar after his dog, Roscoe, was bitten by a rattlesnake. McHale didn’t realize what had happened at first, until hours later when Roscoe began to look very ill. Don’t worry, Roscoe lived and is now doing well, but he did have to spend 10 days in the animal hospital, a stay that presumably resulted in a huge vet bill. McHale wondered how things could have gone differently. Could he have helped Roscoe sooner if the dog had been able to tell him what happened? Thus, the idea of Shazam was born.
Speak!
Yes, the collar is called Shazam, although it has nothing to do with superhero movies or the well-known music discovery service of the same name. Shazam (for pets) has a microphone and voice box inside, allowing it to hear your voice and respond with one of its own. The idea is to make owners feel like they’re having conversations with their pet when they’re actually talking to a collar chatbot.
“Let’s start with states of being,” says McHale. “We measure all kinds of things about the human, about the pet, and about the world. And all of these variables are essentially constant and changing and are inputs to what we call the cognitive cortex, which we build, which is based on learning automatic and large data sets”.
This kind of world building for your pet won’t come cheap. Collars start at $495 for cats and $595 for dogs. There are also subscription fees: $195 a year for the feline and “ultra” collars, or $295 a year for the BrainBoost service, which a Shazam rep says is “what brings all the really sentient qualities like empathy, reasoning, society, and self-awareness.” Both subscription fees are waived during the first year, but will automatically renew after one year band resorts to a generic voice and loses its dynamic qualities, so if you want the best experience, you’ll need to keep paying the $295 annual fee after the first (free) year ends.
