Tech Inspired Dog Names

While the world continues on its trajectory of technological advancement, we often forget that tech is improving many different facets of life. Sure, your car may have advanced safety features and your smartphone may be able to manage your calendar with your voice alone, but our lives aren’t the only ones that technology is helping to improve. 

For the last decade, dog tech has also taken significant strides in ways that we can improve the lives of both humans and dogs and there are plenty of examples to prove it. We now have cameras and remote treat dispensers to watch and treat dogs when we’re away as well as automatic ball launchers for times when we’re unable to provide them sufficient entertainment. There are even safety harnesses for service dogs that provide a quick and easy method for calling 9-1-1 when someone is in trouble. 

But convenience isn’t the only avenue that dog-tech is working towards. Thanks to a few clever individuals, we’re now bringing our dogs into the digital realm as well. And even though they can’t read or write, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have something to say. 

Since 2016, Henry Conklin, a computer science/mathematics student at the University of Virginia, has been developing a way to make his dog’s voice heard — on social media. By rigging up a microphone, a WiFi dongle and a Raspberry Pi, Conklin has been able to set up a system where his dog’s barks are posted on Twitter. 

The system itself is simple yet genius. The Raspberry Pi, an open-ended, small, single-board computer, constantly listens for sounds before it begins recording. Conklin set up a volume threshold to drastically reduce the number of false triggers initiated by unwanted sources (although they do something occur, which means he had to add a filtering stage as well to make sure the recordings were capturing only vocalizations before posting online). 

In the filtering stage, a process analyzes the audio and categorizes it before sending it on to the final posting stage. As it stands, Oliver’s vocalizations are limited to three phrases, “bark,” “ruff” and “woof”, but he plans to develop a bark-to-text translator that would produce similar phrasing but be more accurate to his dog’s actual voice. In combination with current canine studies that analyze the meaning of a dog’s bark type and delivery, it could produce some pretty interesting results in years to come, results that would help provide that much more insight into what our dogs are actually thinking and trying to communicate to us.