This AI-Powered Smart Collar Will Tell You What Your Dog Is Feeling When It Barks

By Ammar Haziq  •  13 Jan 2021 in News

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A few months ago, JUICE covered an app that could translate your cat’s meows and now, we’ve stumbled upon another similar technology for canines. It seems like understanding our pets has become top priority amidst the pandemic.

A South Korean startup has developed a smart collar powered by AI that can detect five emotions by monitoring a dog’s barks using voice recognition.

The Petpuls collar can tell what your dog is feeling via an app on your smartphone. It can detect whether they are happy, anxious, relaxed, angry or sad. It also tracks your dog’s physical activity and rest.

“This device gives a dog a voice so that humans can understand,” Andrew Gil, director of global marketing at Petpuls Lab told Reuters.

Back in 2017, the company started collecting different types of barks to analyse dogs’ emotions. Three years later, they developed a proprietary algorithm based on a database of more than 10,000 barks from 50 dog breeds.

“I thought she was just happy when she played and felt sad and anxious when I wasn’t home… Actually she felt angry when she lost a game she played with me, like how humans feel,” said Moon Sae-Mi, who has a six-year-old Border Collie.

According to Seoul University, which tested the device, the collar has a 90 percent average accuracy rate of emotional recognition.

Petpuls Lab started marketing the collar online in October last year at US$99 (RM400) and says it’s the first of its kind to be powered by AI voice recognition tech.

As more people spend time at home with their pets during the COVID-19 pandemic, the global pet care market’s worth has shot up to US$138 billion in 2020, which is 34 percent more based on a Euromonitor data. The global dog population also grew 18 percent the same year to US$489 million. According to Gil,

“More people began to adopt dogs, but unfortunately some of them abandoned their dogs due to communication. Petpuls can have an important role in the pandemic… It helps owners understand how dogs feel and increases their bonding.”