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