Cell Phone App Turns Cat Meows Into Words | the Chronicle

The engineer Javier Sanchez created the solution for cat owners who don’t understand their pets very well: one byAn app that translates meows into words humans can understand.

Sánchez is a specialist in communication between devices and people. He previously worked at Amazon, especially in his voice assistant, the Alexa project, which worked like Siri from Apple already Google Assistant.

Currently, Sánchez is a project manager at the Akvelon de Bellvue company, which is based in Washington, and his main occupation is application MeowTalk, a system capable of analyzing meows and converting them into human words, through a mechanism similar to that used by Shazam to recognize songs.

Why did you choose cats? “The joke I tell people is that dogs can understand human language, but they don’t speak it”, said the creator of the app.

“But cats don’t care what you say. They can understand you, but they sure don’t say they do, but they clearly have their own vocabulary.“he added.

How does the chat translator work?

According to Sánchez, cats don’t have a language like ours. “They don’t share words and don’t communicate with each other”he told NBC. The leading team found that these animals typically use nine different intentions that they try to convey when they meow. These variations sound different with different intentions, ranging from expressing pain or asking for the door to open, to communicating that they are hungry.

After downloading the app, the user has to record the cat meows and finally get the translations of the sound which has been analyzed via a machine learning system.

As usual in these mechanisms, the results are more precise as the technology is formed. In this case, between five and ten examples are requested for the application to start recognizing the feline’s requests.

“To train the app to learn a specific meow, choose a context where you know for sure what your cat is trying to say (eg food / food, at the door / let me out). Use the app to translate those meows, then provide the correct translation. Repeat at least 5 times ”, They explain in the app description.

MeowTalk can now be downloaded for free in store ios Yes Android, although it is still in development.