Chinese startup claims it developed an AI collar that translates human words into barks and meows

A Chinese AI startup has claimed to make a collar that can solve the age-old problem of not knowing what your pet is saying. The startup, called Meng Xiaoyi, is based out of Hangzhou and has developed a smart collar called PettiChat that is claimed to “translate” pet sounds into human language in real time.

How does the PettiChat work?

The AI-powered collar weighs just 27.2 grams and is built to be lightweight enough to be attached to cats or dogs. The device also comes with an IP65 rating for water and dust resistance, meaning it can withstand a bit of rain and mud.

It comes in a clip-on design, meaning you can also attach it to your pet’s existing collar. There is also support for built-in GPS tracking so that you can ensure your pet is around you at all times.

In terms of how the actual technology works, the PettiChat is built on the Qwen AI model from Alibaba Cloud that is said to be trained on over 1.5 million real-world pet audio samples and 3,200 hours of annotated pet video data collected with the help of veterinarians and volunteers over the last two years.

PettiChat doesn’t just turn the woofs and meows from your pets into English but also translates your words into a language that your pet can understand, promising a “real conversation”.

The AI-powered gadget is claimed to decode animal communication through a multimodal framework that uses audio cues along with visual behaviour to generate the translated response in just 1.2 seconds.

The company says that PettiChat achieves a 94.6% contextual accuracy rate for cats and 92.3% for dogs, while benchmarks shared by the company on its Kickstarter page even claim up to 98.6% average pet detection precision in certain recognition tests.

However, it’s worth noting that there are no third-party studies or independent scientific validations currently available to verify these claims.

The startup claims that a one-hour charge of PettiChat can power over 1,000 “sentence translations”.

PettiChat also comes with a companion app available on Android and iOS in over 170 countries. The app includes features like chat history recall, pet diaries, custom voice settings and behavioural analytics. Meanwhile, the adaptive AI learning feature monitors the pet’s progress and customises their language profile over time, which allows owners a peek into the minds of their companions.

As for the pricing, the Chinese startup is going for a one-time payment option priced at 799 yuan ($119). There is no recurring payment option for any of the features, including inside the app.

The startup claims it has received over 10,000 pre-orders for the AI collar.

With the rise of generative AI, there has been a growing fascination around solving problems that have remained out of reach for decades, including understanding how animals communicate with humans. Recently, famous venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund had also recently led a $220 million investment round in New Zealand startup Halter, a company that builds AI-powered smart collars for cows.