Humans have been trying to talk to animals ever since we figured out how to form words. In modern times, we turn to technology for the solution—giving our dogs talking buttons to paw at, or trying to use artificial intelligence to help us understand whales.
The latest and perhaps most direct approach at human-animal communication is a voice-activated collar that gives your pet the power to talk back to you. Or at least, that’s the idea.
John McHale, a self-described “tech guy” based out of Austin, Texas, has a company called Personifi AI. The startup’s goal, as the name implies, is to create tech that will “personify everything,” as McHale puts it. The first step, for now, is pets.
The company’s collar has a speaker on it; talk to your pet (or, really, talk to the collar) and you’ll hear a prerecorded human voice responding to you, creating the illusion that your pet has a humanlike personality and the ability to speak English. The collar is just for cats and dogs now, but McHale hopes to get into wearable devices for other critters and, eventually, humans.
McHale got the idea for the talking collar after his dog, Roscoe, got bit by a rattlesnake. McHale didn’t realize what had happened at first, until hours later when Roscoe started seeming very unwell. Don’t worry, Roscoe lived and is doing just fine now, but he did have to spend 10 days in the animal hospital, a stay which presumably racked up a large veterinary bill. That harrowing close call stuck with McHale, and he wondered how things might have gone differently. Could he have helped Roscoe sooner if the dog had just been able to tell him what happened? Thus, the idea of Shazam was born.
Speak!
Oh yeah, the collar is called Shazam, though it has no relation to either the superhero movies or the very well known music discovery service of the same name. Shazam (for pets) has both a microphone and voice box inside, allowing it to hear your voice and respond with one of its own. The idea is to make owners feel like they’re having conversations with their pet when really, they’re talking to a chatbot on the collar.
“We start with states of being,” McHale says. “We measure all sorts of things about the human, about the pet, and about the world. And all those variables are essentially ongoing and changing and are inputs to what we call the cognitive cortex, which we build, which is based on machine learning and large data sets.”
That sort of world-building for your pet won’t come cheap. The collars start at $495 for cats and $595 for dogs. There are also subscription fees—$195 a year for the feline and “ultra” collars, or $295 a year for the BrainBoost service, which a rep for Shazam says is “what brings all of the truly sentient qualities such as empathy, reasoning, social awareness, and self awareness.” Both of those subscription fees are waived for the first year but will automatically renew after a year. Without the BrainBoost subscription, the band falls back to a generic voice and loses its dynamic qualities, so if you want the best experience, you have to keep paying the $295 yearly fee after the first (free) year ends.