This Crazy New App May Finally Tell You What Your Cat Is Trying To Say
If you’ve ever had a cat, you’ve probably wondered at one point or another what they’re trying to tell you (though in some cases it’s very clear). The more you’re around them, the more clear their messages become.
Here to offer another way of interpreting your feline’s meowing is MeowTalk, an app that offers translations of cat vocalizations. This project is the work of Javier Sanchez, who is familiar with both technology and cats.
“I worked in the machine learning platform team at Alexa for a while,” Sanchez told GeekWire. “And I got to see how the sausage was made, how they train their models and work with all the data science platforms. So I was fresh off the heels of that and I was thinking, ‘Well, we could do something similar with cats and it could be an app.'”
He pointed out that during stay-at-home measures, this tool could become even more useful.
“A tool like this can help certain people bond even more with their cats, especially if they can’t be in contact with other people on a regular basis. So this could be a real game-changer for a key demographic that have cats.”
Sanchez, who has both dogs and cats, is very aware of the differences between the two.
“Dogs absolutely understand what you’re telling them — they understand, they can’t talk,” he told KING-TV. “Cats, opposite. They don’t care what you say. But they can tell you what they want you to do.”
Cat “speech” is different from ours, though. For starters, “meowing” is reserved for kittens getting the attention of their mothers and cats getting the attention of their owners. Adult cats don’t meow to each other, though they will make other sounds like yowling, according to the ASPCA.
“It’s not a language,” Sanchez acknowledged. “They don’t share words and they don’t communicate with each other. Cats never meow at each other out in nature.”
Instead, his research has led him to isolate nine different “intents” behind meows, and his app is designed to help you determine what your cat might want. Options include “I’m hungry,” “I’m in pain,” “I’m happy,” “I want my toy,” and “I’m gonna fight.”
Sanchez also said a translating collar is in the works, which he demonstrated on his kitten. As he wrangled his own kitten and fitted it with the collar, it meowed and the collar stated “I’m angry, leave me alone.”
Of course, one size does not fit all, and cat vocalizations are very nuanced. The app can learn these intricacies and adapt more and more to your specific feline(s) as it gathers more data and the user corrects it.
“Using machine learning MeowTalk instantaneously translates your cat’s meows into one of nine general cat intents; these nine intents represent cat moods and states of mind,” the app description says. “But each cat also has its own unique vocalization and vocabulary of meows that goes beyond these nine general intents.”
“You can train the MeowTalk app to learn your cat’s unique vocabulary of meows (cat talk) by telling the app what each meow means when your cat makes it. When you give the app 5 to 10 examples of a specific meow for your cat (e.g. ‘food’, ‘let me out’) the app can start to recognize that meow (be your cat translator) when it hears it.”
“The language recognition is updated once a day so it may take up to 24 hours for the app to start recognizing the new word of your pet after you have provided the training information.”
“To train the app to learn a specific meow pick a context where you know with certainty what your cat is trying to say (e.g. feeding -> ‘food’, at the door -> ‘let me out’). Use the app to translate those meows then provide the correct translation. Repeat at least 5 times.”
A beta version of the app is available now and owners have reported a range of success levels. Some find it fascinating, while others think giving cats a voice is flirting with Pandora’s box. Would you try this out with your own pet?
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