It is the dream of almost pet owner to be able to translate what their animal is saying. This might be especially true of cat owners, as they can be a lot more aloof and harder to read, but this has seemed like a pipedream for years, although it may not be true for much longer. Since Artificial Intelligence has appeared in the scene it has been used for plenty of important things, but every technology can be applied to fun pursuits, and in this case, it could be really useful to know what our feline companions are saying.
Of course, most responsible pet owners can tell with a bit of time what their companion means when they meow or hiss, but that comes more from experience and shared time together more than from plain knowledge. But thanks to new developments in Artificial Intelligence we could be looking at certainty very soon.
A recent preprint titled “FGC2.3 Feline Vocalization Classification and Cat Translation Project” introduced a machine learning model that can recognize up to 40 different cat vocalizations with an impressive 95% accuracy. While the tool is new and has not been widely tested it is the first attempt to use Artificial Intelligence to understand cats.
The new Artificial Intelligence technology that could tell us what cats say
Created by Vlad Reznikov, an engineer who has been working for years at the intersection of machine learning and animal sounds and his team, this tool has collected thousands of real-life recordings of cats in homes, shelters, and vet clinics and then sorted them by behavior, for example attaching them to stress, play, or asking for attention. Then the tool has been trained to tell them apart based on their acoustic patterns.
This technology is quite advanced, it picks out things like pitch changes, duration, and sequence, and translates them into understandable categories like the “frustrated meow at an unresponsive toy” or the “contact-seeking purr.”
This is not the first, nor will it be the last, attempt at trying to understand our pets, especially in today’s society where animals have been given a status that is far closer to other humans than to the traditional work aids that they have been for millennia. To help owners, new resources like the book What Science Knows About Your Cat by Mary Granero Fernández are helping bring real science into everyday homes. They are also proving that trying to understand pets better is not a futile exercise, but that it can lead to better care and deeper bonds.
Domestication of cats goes back roughly 12,000 years to the Fertile Crescent and since then cats have evolved to live alongside humans, even developing a wider vocal range than their wild relatives. In fact, many of the sounds cats make are just for humans. As the paper suggests, “many cats’ meows are specifically directed at humans.” Ethologists like John Bradshaw and Charlotte Cameron-Beaumont had pointed this out before, but Artificial Intelligence is helping confirm it.
That said, we are not decoding a secret language here, studies show that most cat owners, even without training, can often tell how their cats feel based just on vocal tone and Artificial Intelligence is just taking that a bit further and identifying patterns and linking them to contexts. And cats, like people, are individuals, some are vocal, others quiet, some even develop regional “accents,” and body language still plays a massive role in how they communicate.
Apps like MeowTalk already offer a simplified version of this tech to translate feline sounds in real time, so if you are curious, you might want to try to download it and see if you really know what your cat is saying.