Researchers at the University of Michigan are exploring the potential of artificial intelligence in understanding dog communication.

They are developing tools to differentiate between playful and aggressive barks, aiming to extract details like the dog’s age, breed, and sex from its vocalizations.

Rada Mihalcea, director of U-M’s AI laboratory, highlights the use of speech processing models originally trained on human speech to delve into the subtleties of dog barks.

Their study, involving 74 dogs in various scenarios, demonstrates that these AI models can serve as a foundation for new systems targeting animal communication, the New York Post has reported.

Mihalcea suggests that leveraging existing advancements in speech processing could revolutionize our comprehension of animal behaviors without needing to start from scratch.

Nonetheless, the researchers note challenges due to limited publicly available data for training AI to analyze animal vocalizations.

Written by B.C. Begley