(Reuters) – A South Korean startup has developed an AI-powered collar that can detect five emotions in dogs by tracking their barks using speech recognition technology.
The Petpuls collar can tell pet owners via a smartphone application whether their dogs are happy, relaxed, anxious, angry or sad. It also tracks dogs’ physical activity and rest.
“This device gives a dog a voice that humans can understand,” Andrew Gil, director of global marketing at Petpuls Lab, told Reuters.
The company began collecting different types of barks in 2017 to analyze dogs’ emotions. Three years later they developed their own algorithm based on a database of more than 10,000 samples from 50 dog breeds.
“I thought she was just happy when she played and felt sad and anxious when I wasn’t home … actually she felt angry when she lost a game she played with me, like how people feel,” said Moon Sae-mi, who has a six-year-old Border Collie.
The collar has an average accuracy of 90 percent of emotional recognition, according to Seoul National University, which tested the device, the company says it is the first of its kind to be powered by AI speech recognition technology.
Petpuls Lab began marketing the collar online for $ 99 last October.
The global pet care market was worth $ 138 billion in 2020, up 34 percent, data from Euromonitor found, as more people spent time at home with their pets or adopted pets during the COVID-19 pandemic. The global dog population also grew 18% to 489 million in the same year.
“More people started to adopt dogs, but unfortunately some abandoned their dogs because of miscommunication,” Gil said. “Pet pulses could play an important role in the pandemic … it helps owners understand how dogs feel and improves their bonding.”
Reporting by Minwoo Park and Daewoung Kim; Editing by Jacqueline Wong