Forming the Dog Internet: Prototyping a Dog-to-Human Video Call Device (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Forming the Dog Internet: Prototyping a Dog-to-Human Video Call Device (2021)

dl.acm.org

52 pointsbookofjoe15 comments

I wonder why they didn't try to use a "talk button"? Initiating the call by picking up a specific toy and shaking it seems.. I don't know, unnecessarily complicated. I don't know how true or unique it is for dogs to be able to learn to talk with buttons, but there are many YouTube videos showing how they are trained and how the dogs talk with them. Like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m-xupLJc4M or this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3njWjIimd4

So a few things would be interesting to see:

1.) Does the system work better if the dogs start & stop calls with buttons instead of shaking a ball?

2.) What if you added _other_ buttons for dogs to talk to other dogs? I think it might be boring for both human and dog because there is no physical aspect, but maybe dogs barking at each other would be interesting for them?

3.) When dogs learn the system, will we observe behaviors and customs change? Maybe they will call certain dogs more often, or create new rituals to start and stop calls. Maybe they will act like children (I mean this literally) where they just turn the video on, go about their day, and once in a while say something to each other.

I wonder, though, if dogs would be satisfied communicating to each other without being able to smell each other.

I think it's worth experimenting with - maybe next to the video camera there can be a "dog smell" emitter. Haha.

Dogs manipulate the world with their mouths. While they learn to do things with their paws, the most natural thing for them to do is to pick something up with their mouths. Shaking a toy is in-built behaviour.

Buttons are a trained behavior. It takes training to get a dog to use those buttons and most credentialed trainers will heavily rely on rewards for training. The researchers here were trying to use an innate behavior. That makes sense because they want to check if the dog would use an innate behavior to initiate communication. If they rely on a trained behavior the dog may be doing it to get the reward that was used to train the dog and NOT doing it solely to initiate communication.

A lot of those talking buttons videos you see in my opinion are either scripted/edited or a bit of projection/reinterpretation of what’s going on in human terms. I have a dog I love to death and the lengths people including myself will go to reinterpret their behavior in human terms is incredible.

dogs are already excellent communicators, they don't need buttons

and most dog owners wouldn't have the time nor the discipline to train their dog to use these buttons

An unbelievably long and winding paper for something that didn't even appear to work, and can be summarized by "we made a device that calls me when my dog plays with his toy". The call logs are full of the dog calling accidentally, calling while sleeping with his toy, or otherwise not even seeming to realize he was calling anyone.

The paper reads like something one would write in high-school when you're given an assignment to write a 5 page paper. You fill it up with fluff until you hit 5 pages.

Dogs communicate mainly by smell and sound. I don’t even think dogs see screens, at the way we do.

If you somehow make the device smell like the human when the dog presses it then I guarantee you’ll get a much stronger response. Maybe the dog would even figure out that when he gets lonely, he can press the button to get a “remote” presence and voice of his owner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Wouldn't it be a better idea to try with birds first due to having a higher social intelligence than dogs?

Or pigs

I think there are far more dog pets than bird pets. From an impact-making perspective, dogs looks like a more attractive user base: - https://www.statista.com/statistics/414956/dog-population-eu.... - https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pvMc7w...

All we need now is a Pig-to-Human Video Call Device.

Who is funding this?

Who let the dogs chat?

Who! Who! Who Who!

(sorry)

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