The Future Of

Here's a familiar routine.

You come home from work and yell...

Hello. I'm home.

Where's my good girl?

And here she comes, wiggling, barking, jumping, and licking.

But what do all those barks and wiggles actually mean?

Who's a good doggie?

In the future,

you might finally understand what's going on in your dog's mind.

Because she'll tell you.

The tools to understand our dogs are coming,

and they're going to give us a whole new window

into the lives of the furriest members of our family.

I'm gonna have to say, I think pet translation is pretty crazy.

As a concept, it's absolutely crazy. Um, the thing is, it's possible.

In the future,

technology will let us communicate with our dogs like never before.

I mean, it'd be cool to see what a dog is actually thinking.

If you get inside a dog's head, a dog might look at you like...

Food hoarder! She's a food hoarder!

That might be a Pandora's Box, we might not like what they're thinking.

They might even stop communicating with us

and start surfing the web.

Maybe they want to chew the internet and all these other fabulous things.

If we learn to listen, really listen,

we may be able to give them an even better life.

I think the closer to humanity something is,

the more you have to embrace it and the more you respect it.

This is our dog, Bubba.

Bubba "Blue Eyes" Baker.

And this is Chili Cheese.

My dog's name is Sparks.

This is my dog, Dexter. He just turned 11 last Friday.

People and dogs go way back.

Over the last 15,000 years, we've taken the wolf,

turned it into the wiener dog

and made that wiener dog an incredibly important part of our lives.

He's like my child, I would say.

They call it man's best friend because a dog loves you unconditionally.

We've been doing this now, like, 30 years.

My grandfather was a hunter,

he had German Shepherds and we'd take care of the dogs.

It just grew from there.

We love our dogs,

and we spend a ton of money on them, all of our pets, really.

In the US alone,

pet owners shell out over $100 billion a year.

And yet, even with all that investment,

there's one thing people still struggle with.

Down.

Communication.

Iris, down.

Not for lack of trying.

Ey, down.

We've invented mood-ring collars

that claim to tell us how our dogs might be feeling...

There you are. Hi.

...webcams to say hi when we're not home,

and buttons dogs can press to make very basic requests in English.

Come play?

But this current tech

doesn't completely close the communication gap.

There's still so much we don't understand about what dogs are really saying.

Sparky! Sparky, come with me, bro.

We just might need a dog whisperer to share their secrets.

Dog training is 99.9% people training.

The challenge and the task for me is to translate

and get the human to understand what the dog is saying,

what the dog needs.

So, how do dogs communicate?

Dog trainers have learned to pick up on their subtle cues.

There are different ways that dogs can communicate

with humans and dogs.

A lot of dogs speak with their body.

They have exquisite control over their ears and tails.

Minute movements can spell out stress, excitement, fear, or relaxation.

And, of course, the barks.

Barks can be greetings, warnings,

attention-seeking, or expressions of pain.

They're all different sounds.

Smell is also key.

Their noses are at least 10,000 times more sensitive than ours.

With odors, dogs can give off or pick up

information about age, reproductive health,

and psychological states.

What's he telling you?

From their odors, to the fur on their backs,

to the way they bite other dogs,

there are so many subtle ways dogs communicate their emotions.

Whether all these signals add up to language is a question for linguists,

but we can still try to decode what they're actually saying.

The end goal is for the humans to be able to understand

and communicate with their dog.

And that opens up a whole 'nother world.

Humans might not be fluent in bark anytime soon,

but within the next ten years, artificial intelligence is on track

to translate those nuanced dog behaviors into a human language we can understand.

Those futuristic developments are already underway.

I'm Con Slobodchikoff, I'm founder and CEO of Zoolingua.

We are developing a pet translator

to translate dog language into human language.

I might be out of a job with that thing.

Con spent 40 years studying how animals like dogs communicate.

Now, he's turning those years of research

into an AI-driven software called Zoolingua.

Eventually what's going to happen is that somebody will have an app,

probably on their cell phone,

and they will record the behavior of their dog.

This app will send information up into the cloud,

where the AI model will analyze the behavior.

There are some dog-translation apps already available,

but most just listen to barks, if the app is listening at all.

And they claim to be for entertainment purposes only.

By using AI to analyze thousands of hours of dog footage,

apps like Zoolingua could start to pick out

all those subtle dog communication cues like barks, wiggles, and sniffs

that humans usually don't notice.

If we can associate those cues with sentiments,

- anger, fear, frustration... -

...we'll be on our way to a true dog translator.

With this app,

we would know for sure what it is that the dog is trying to tell us.

And you'd be able to know what the dog is saying to you?

That's dope. I mean, if it's really... if it's real, it's dope.

Con is not the only one trying to decode animal communication

using artificial intelligence.

Computer scientists at the University of Cambridge

have trained an algorithm to look at a sheep's facial expression

and gauge how much pain it's in.

A company in Sweden is using AI to decode dolphin communication.

But for all this tech to really work,

we need to learn a lot more

about what's going on inside different animals' heads.

Whether their thoughts and feelings even translate to human language,

and that includes dogs.

- - Baby.

The system has to be able to look at their ear position

or their tail position,

and in order for it to correspond to patterns in what they mean,

we have to know what they mean, which we don't always.

The question, I think, is how nuanced,

how detailed are we really going to be able to be here?

I just don't feel like a machine can fully translate

what the dog really wants.

It's a little bit deeper than a machine, you know.

It's not an X-ray machine or Google Translate.

It's a little bit more complex than that.

Let's be optimistic though, and imagine

our working dog translator arrives one day.

How will that change our relationship to our dogs?

At first, pet parents will probably have to chase their dogs around

with their phones to figure out how they're feeling.

But in the coming decades,

this technology could become a real game-changer.

Vets could use more accurate sensors to better diagnose their patients.

There'd be supersensitive microphones

that could pick up the entire range of dog vocalizations,

high-speed cameras to track

the smallest changes in their body language,

and even odor sensors to detect the pheromones they're releasing.

This technology might even help diagnose mysterious medical issues.

Could this technology help diagnose depression?

Another thing that'd be really useful

for this kind of AI is at dog parks,

when you could actually see two dogs interacting with each other.

And sometimes I think, for humans, it's hard to tell

if that's, like, a play interaction, is that a not-play interaction?

And if the AI can say,

"Hey, hey. Danger zone here. This is actually not play,"

and you can separate the dogs before it becomes an issue.

That'd be another amazing application.

If this technology gets good enough,

we might finally know what our dogs are trying to tell us.