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Comment by gregoriol | Hacker News Reader

While maybe not very useful, it would be fun to have a real translation of dogs (and other animals). I have a lot of questions that I'd like them to answer.

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In order to translate language, the animal has to be speaking language. That is, they have to be putting some sort of emotion or indicator into their vocalizations that would be able to be decoded in the first place.

There's a channel on YouTube called BilliSpeaks where someone trained their cat to be able to press buttons to speak. The cat can answer questions, communicate feelings and even have conversations with the help of their translator, but only because they were trained on how to use it.

What about communication between animals?

My cats heavily use body language and physical activity to communicate with each other, rather than explicit vocalization. Their body language is passive, and their physical activity is indicative (and usually, so are their vocalizations); they don't exactly directly communicate concepts like human language does.

It would be nice if it were translatable, though.

I wonder if pets in households with those talking buttons ever use them to communicate with each other, or if they never choose to because it's so much less efficient than natural conspecific communication for most of the things they would want to 'talk' about.

One use case I could see is storytelling, specifically to share events that one of the animals was not present for.

In my house, my dogs usually seem to 'communicate' by calling the other's attention, and then observing the same thing together. Maybe they'd like to tell stories for some of the things that one of them misses.

> I wonder if pets in households with those talking buttons ever use them to communicate with each other, or if they never choose to because it's so much less efficient than natural conspecific communication for most of the things they would want to 'talk' about.

I haven't yet seen an example of it. I think pets learn to use the buttons to make requests or answer them, but they never do that with each other because they never really have any requests or answers for each other, if that makes any sense.

Correct. Dogs will vocalize and use touch with one another but the buttons are exclusively (at least from what I've observed) used for communicating with people. Though dogs & cats have specific vocalizations for speaking with people. Though we're now seeing vocalizations in new species that we didn't expect such as plants[1] & turtles[2].

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-record-... 2. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/31/1132951238/what-sound-does-a-...

That's exactly right so you can expand the vocabulary of animals especially dogs with training similar to how they train dogs to press buttons. This research is much more extensive with captive dolphins and now we're seeing the same with domesticated animals.

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