Okay, so I read in this article that a Japanese toy maker created a device that will loosely translate a dogs growls and whatnot into English (well, Japanese) for the dogs’ owners. What I want to know is, how (or if) will this work?
I mean, each dog has a voice that’s a different pitch from others, and, besides that, are the languages of dogs similar enough across the board for such a device to work? And what, exactly, will the device be looking for? Is it going to be all pitch and tone and whatnot, or will it actually be looking for phonemes and stuff?
And, most importantly, am I the only person thinking about the baby translator from The Simpsons?
Zoggie, I think you have your doggie translator on the wrong setting. “BARK! BARK! BARK!” means, “OPEN THE DAMNED DOOR OR I’ll LEAVE MY MARK ON YOUR EXPENSIVE PERSIAN RUG!”
Forget cloning or stem cell research, I think THIS is the best example of science gone awry. There’s a great episode of “Dexter’s Laboratory” where Dexter gives a stray dog the ability to speak English, and the dog spends the rest of the episode saying “Hey! Hey! Hey! It’s the guy! The guy with the thing! The thing! Hey! I’m a dog! Can you hear me! I’m a dog! Hey! I’m a dog! Is that food? Food for me?”
To me, it sounds pretty sketchy, even for a Japanese toy-gadget. According to the article, “Its makers say the machine can make sense of a range of six doggy emotions - frustration, alarm, self-expression, happiness, sadness and desire - and transmit the results to a display on a hand-held console.” So from that, I’m assuming that it just roughly differentiates growls from whimpers from normal barks, and maybe counts up how many times your dog makes noise during the day. It sounds more like a dog mood ring than anything else.
Whatever it is, I hope it’s not as sickeningly cute as that article. “I’m arf-ully lonely. Please play with me more.” “Bow-lingual can tell whether a pet has had a “ruff” day.” “So many fun things today. What an ultra-happy day”. Makes me wonder if Sanrio is involved. At least it’s not a feline translator, that would be a “CAT-astrophe,” far from “PURR-fect.”
