The fictional Dr. Dolittle has the special ability to talk to animals, but a group of researchers have made his fictional ability into reality using a computer program that can translate a dog's woofs into words.
Researchers from the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and the Technical University of Madrid have found that the sound that dogs produce when they bark can give hints about their age and gender and based on this developed a computer program that determines a dog's sex and age through its bark.
For their research, which was reported in the journal Animal Cognition, the team conducted an analysis of 800 barks that were recorded from eight Hungarian Mudi dogs in seven various situations, which included the dog's owner holding a ball in front of the dog, the owner holding a bowl of food, the owner wrestling with the dog, the owner tying the dog to a tree and walking away, as well as a stranger appearing in the front door or garden.
The researchers then came up with complex algorithms that have the capability to predict not just the age and gender of a dog based on its bark but also the context of its barking.
The algorithms were based on 20 acoustic measurements such as the length, volume and pitch of the barks and were capable of recognizing the gender of the dog 85.13 percent of the time. The algorithms were also able to identify the age of the dog 80.25 percent of the time.
The researchers said that while canine communication has been very much studied recently, most of these studies focused on how dogs perceive human communication, including hand gestures and voices. The study marks the first time that the age and gender of dogs have been predicted with the aid of sound analysis.
"I imagine vets could use these techniques to help identify what is wrong with a dog and we are already working on an application for social robotics," said Tamas Farago, from Eotvos Lorand University. Scientists should be able to come up with emotional sounds for robots using dog barks that are recognizable by humans, Farago said, which could be a means to create believable social robots. Social robots are machines that can communicate and interact with humans.
Animal shelters can also make use of the software as it could be used to recognize distressed or frightened dogs as well as diagnose behavioral problems such as separation anxieties, allowing staff to more efficiently find the right new home for these animals.
Photo: Martin L | Flickr
