Artificial intelligence could help determine whether a dog is barking at you because it wants to play — or plans to attack.
Researchers are developing digital tools to decipher a dog's bark, including the age, breed and sex of the animal, the University of Michigan said in a statement Tuesday.
As part of a joint study with Mexico's National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics, Humberto Pérez-Espinosa the NIAOE led a team that recorded barks from 74 dogs of different breeds, ages and sexes in a variety of contexts.
Michigan graduate student Artem Abzaliev then used the audio to modify a computer algorithm called Wav2Vec2, which was trained to identify patterns in human speech data.
Professor Rada Mihalcea, director of U-M's AI Laboratory, said the research marked the "first time that techniques optimized for human speech have been built upon to help with the decoding of animal communication."
Mihalcea also said it opened a "new window into how we can leverage what we built so far in speech processing to start understanding the nuances of dog barks."
"There is so much we don't yet know about the animals that share this world with us," Mihalcea said.
"Advances in AI can be used to revolutionize our understanding of animal communication, and our findings suggest that we may not have to start from scratch."
