Dog owners are letting their pets use “talking buttons” to express what they want, and it’s changing the way we think about animal intelligence. Veuer’s Matt Hoffman reports.
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00:00You can train a dog to speak, but you can't train it to use words. Until now.
00:05A new product called Talking Buttons, like this example from Fluent Pet,
00:09allows pet owners to record words like outside or food onto buttons that their
00:14animals can press in order to communicate what they want. According to Vice, the concept was
00:19invented by a speech pathologist named Christina Hunger, who got the idea from her work with
00:24children. And now, these devices are inspiring scientific research into what they can reveal
00:28about animals' capacities to understand and use language. The project They Can Talk is
00:33gathering data on that very subject, though it hasn't yet published any conclusive results.
00:38It's a field that inspires a lot of skepticism. Researcher Amritha Mallikarjan told Scientific
00:43American that dogs can't use language in the same way as humans, and that
00:47there is a lot of confirmation bias. We desperately want them to be saying something to us.
00:52But Talking Buttons have produced anecdotal evidence of creative use of words. Like a
00:57dog that asked for ice by combining the words water and bone, as reported by Vice.
01:02These investigations focus mostly on dogs, but veterinary behaviorist Valli Parthasarathy says
01:07cats can learn in the same way, though good luck getting a cat to do anything.
01:12For now, inquiries into how much intelligence animals are capable of are ongoing.
01:16Maybe someday they can tell us themselves.