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A new study shows how AI models can be used to reveal information about dogs based on their barks. Researchers are using AI models trained on human speech to decode the secret language of dogs. The study comes from researchers at the University of Michigan’s National Institute of Astrophysics.
There is so much we don’t yet know about the animals that share this world with us,” said Rada Mihalcea, the director of the University of Michigan’s AI Laboratory.
The study makes use of the cutting-edge Wav2Vec2 AI speech model to determine the breed, emotion, and gender of a dog hiding behind any given bark. The findings of two training sets—one that was trained entirely on canine barks and the other that was pre-trained on human speech before being refined on barks and were then compared by the researchers.
The model pre-trained on nearly 1,000 hours of human speech recordings did better. Researchers then fine-tuned that model on a data set consisting of barks from 74 dogs: 42 Chihuahua, 21 French Poodles, and 11 Schnauzer.
All of these scores outpaced the AI model just trained on dogs, which suggests that sound and patterns derived from human speech can potentially serve as a foundation for understanding animals.
In order to fully grasp the scope of this technology, the researchers said they plan to test additional breeds, emotions, and species in the future. For the first time, animal communications have been decoded using human speech models, and this could pave the way for the study of animal language. Researchers consider this study as a promising beginning in the right direction, even though it is by no means definitive in explaining the meaning of all dog barks.