MeowTalk

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Did you have a desire to talk to your pet? Did you want to understand him? If not, don’t even keep reading, otherwise this article is for you.

A new cat translator app called Meowtalk has been creating a lot of excitement in the press recently. The Android app claims to help you understand what your cat is trying to say to you. Top cat apps are nothing new, but Javier Sanchez, a former Amazon engineer who worked on Alexa’s voice recognition device, created this one.The Meowtalk app actually analyses cat sounds to see if it can work out the meaning behind them.

Strangely, meows are mostly a human-cat interaction rather than one used between cats themselves. As Sanchez explained to KING5: “It’s not a language. They don’t share words or communicate with each other. Cats never meow at each other out in nature.”

Well in case you’re wondering how it works, MeowTalk records the sound and then attempts to identify the meaning. Cat’s meows mean different with different pitch and sound.

The cat’s owner also helps to label the translation, creating a database for the AI software to learn from. Currently, there are only 13 phrases in the app’s vocabulary including: “Feed me!”, “I’m angry!” and “Leave me alone!”

Of course, the developers don’t want to stop there. The ultimate objective is to develop a smart-collar that would translate your cat’s meow instantly.

“I think this is especially important now because, with all the social distancing that’s happening, you have people that are confined at home with … a significant other – this feline,” Javier Sanchez, group technical program manager at app developer Akvelon, explained.

It’s certainly a fun step along the way to communicating with our feline friends, and with over 100,000 downloads of the app already, that database of cat sounds is just going to grow – who knows what can be done with that data in the future?

 

Sources:

https://www.google.com.ua/amp/s/www.hitc.com/en-gb/2020/11/19/how-to-download-meowtalk/%3Famp

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54991693

https://www.en24news.com/homepage-infinite-scroll

5 thoughts on “MeowTalk

  1. Karhol Oleksandr says:

    It would be interesting to evaluate how accurate it is. I guess we can not understand cats only by sounds. Their body language says much more.
    Of course, I may be wrong.

  2. Izmaylova Kseniya says:

    It seems to me that cats also have a difference between their languages and because of this there may be problems with translation. But it is my opinion)

  3. Zhukova Mariia says:

    I think this app can help us to understand the basic phrases of cats, not all of them. But it would already be the great chance to become closer with our pets

  4. Brygida Voicu says:

    wow i was not aware that meows are just for human-cat interaction. Its very interesting how animals try to adapt and communicate with humans. Interesting app, but I think that regarding what the app can translate (being hungry/angry)- most of cat owners can recognize themselves. Nevertheless, it seems super interesting and if expanded it might turn out to be completely mindblowing. (But still I think that the fact that AI can recognize what a cat wants to say through his meows is very impressing)

  5. Łoboda Zofia says:

    I’d like to test this app on my cat, unfortunately she hardly ever meows.

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