Alma The Talking Dog Might Win Some Bar Bets

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!

17 thoughts on “Alma The Talking Dog Might Win Some Bar Bets

    1. 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.

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