Students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have a brain-computer interface that can measure brainwaves. What did they do with it? They gave it to Alma, a golden labrador, as you can see in the video below. The code and enough info to duplicate the electronics are on GitHub.
Of course, the dog doesn’t directly generate speech. Instead, the circuit watches her brainwaves via an Arduino and feeds the raw data to a Raspberry Pi. A machine learning algorithm determines Alma’s brainwave state and plays prerecorded audio expressing Alma’s thoughts.
Alma’s collar duplicates — to some degree — the fictional collar from the movie Up. Of course, Dug was a bit more loquacious. It isn’t very clear from the video how many states the program classifies. A quick peek at the code reveals five audio clips but only one appears to be wired to the recognizer — the one for a treat. We think it might be a harder problem to figure out when the dog does not want a treat.
The last time we saw a talking dog collar it was phone-controlled. If you really want to probe a brain — canine or human — you could do worse than to check out OpenHardwareExG.
Oh. By the way. Good dog! Very good dog!
SQUIRREL!
Translating “dog speak” into “English” isn’t that hard. Learn dogs’ body language. It’s quite expressive and reliable.
Yes, I thought of making something analog sensors to monitor tail wags, hair standing on back, barks to translate into human speak
What’s really cool is you can train your dog to communicate. “Go show” is my favorite command. One of my dogs would often come to me indicating they want something, I’d prompt them to “go show” and they would take me to and bump with their nose whatever item or action it was that they wanted. Food, walk, go out, special treat, someone to come home, something going on outside, etc.
Man I see so many dogs learning amazing behaviors but I can’t comprehend the first step of how to train a dog to do this. Props to you
It’s a labrador. They mostly think stuff like Food!, Food!, Prey!, Food! or Decomposing-seagull-deodorant!
Or Food!
Have a purebred chocolate lab, can confirm! “Treat” “Food” “Cat $h!t”….
lol:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCzRzOfj5vE
Classic
Ooh! Walks! My Favourite! Ooh! Food! My Favourite!
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/21/joke-cat-vs-dog—-war-of_n_1534447.html
Suggests a cat might be harder. :-)
Nickel paint electrodes? Not safe for longterm skin contact at all.
The cat would be simple, it would just be “GET THIS F**KING THING OFF MY F**KING HEAD!!!!” (I imagine if the could cats would swear a lot.)
Since when does a dog NOT want a treat?
Reminds me of the “Not Hotdog” detector from Silicon Valley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs
Treat & Not Treat!
Here is a previous experiment with reading a dog’s mind.
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/translator/3483869
There is no such thing as a golden Labrador
only yellow, black or chocolate
Says who? People made up those classifications and people can make up new classifications. I, for instance, have a white Labrador.