Computer Program Could Translate Dog Barks Into Human Speech

By Brandon Keim
January 16, 2008 | 12:57:50 PM

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Hungarian researchers have written a program that explains the meaning of dogs' barks.

The software is still a bit buggy, but it's promising enough to suggest that computers could one day translate not only between humans, but between species.

For a study scheduled to be published this week in Animal Cognition, researchers from Eötvös Loránd University developed algorithms to analyze the acoustic features of dog barks. Then they recorded 14 Hungarian sheepdogs barking 6,000 times in a variety of situations—greeting a stranger, picking a fight and so on.

Their program correctly classified 43 percent of the barks—not exactly a staggering accuracy rate, but better than most humans achieve by sound alone. (Reassuringly, it was particularly good at tagging 'fight' barks.) It was also able to identify the individual dog behind each bark about half the time—again not an overwhelming number, but better than people can do with dogs from the same breed.

Wrote the researchers, “The use of advanced machine learning algorithms to classify and analyze animal sounds opens new perspectives for the understanding of animal communication."

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