Humans have been trying to talk to animals ever since we figured out how to form words. In modern times, we turn to technology for the solution—giving our dogs talking buttons to paw at, or trying to use artificial intelligence to help us understand whales.
The latest and perhaps most direct approach at human-animal communication is a voice-activated collar that gives your pet the power to talk back to you. Or at least, that’s the idea.
John McHale, a self-described “tech guy” based out of Austin, Texas, has a company called Personifi AI. The startup’s goal, as the name implies, is to create tech that will “personify everything,” as McHale puts it. The first step, for now, is pets.
The company’s collar has a speaker on it; talk to your pet (or, really, talk to the collar) and you’ll hear a prerecorded human voice responding to you, creating the illusion that your pet has a humanlike personality and the ability to speak English. The collar is just for cats and dogs now, but McHale hopes to get into wearable devices for other critters and, eventually, humans.
McHale got the idea for the talking collar after his dog, Roscoe, got bit by a rattlesnake. McHale didn’t realize what had happened at first, until hours later when Roscoe started seeming very unwell. Don’t worry, Roscoe lived and is doing just fine now, but he did have to spend 10 days in the animal hospital, a stay which presumably racked up a large veterinary bill. That harrowing close call stuck with McHale, and he wondered how things might have gone differently. Could he have helped Roscoe sooner if the dog had just been able to tell him what happened? Thus, the idea of Shazam was born.
Speak!
Oh yeah, the collar is called Shazam, though it has no relation to either the superhero movies or the very well known music discovery service of the same name. Shazam (for pets) has both a microphone and voice box inside, allowing it to hear your voice and respond with one of its own. The idea is to make owners feel like they’re having conversations with their pet when really, they’re talking to a chatbot on the collar.
“We start with states of being,” McHale says. “We measure all sorts of things about the human, about the pet, and about the world. And all those variables are essentially ongoing and changing and are inputs to what we call the cognitive cortex, which we build, which is based on machine learning and large data sets.”
That sort of world-building for your pet won’t come cheap. The collars start at $495 for cats and $595 for dogs. There are also subscription fees—$195 a year for the feline and “ultra” collars, or $295 a year for the BrainBoost service, which a rep for Shazam says is “what brings all of the truly sentient qualities such as empathy, reasoning, social awareness, and self awareness.” Both of those subscription fees are waived for the first year but will automatically renew after a year. Without the BrainBoost subscription, the band falls back to a generic voice and loses its dynamic qualities, so if you want the best experience, you have to keep paying the $295 yearly fee after the first (free) year ends.
The collars are available for preorder now, but the company says shipping won’t start until February 2025. (Add this one to the list of AI-powered wearable devices that you can pay for now but can’t get until next year, along with gadgets like the AI Friend necklace.)
Beyond seemingly giving your fur baby the power of speech, Shazam for pets has other, more practical uses, namely an array of safety features any pet owner would likely be grateful to have. The collar’s microphone and sensors can detect rattlesnakes by listening for the sound of a rattle, or detect if a pet goes missing or is kidnapped. If something like that goes wrong with your pet, you get an alert or a text right away. The collar can also keep track of routines, like picking up the sounds of your dog eating food at certain times of day. It can use that to detect if your pet hasn’t been fed that morning and trigger the voice bot to say something to remind you about it. You will, of course, also have to put aside the very valid privacy concerns that come with your pet running around with an always-on microphone on its collar. But the safety and well-being features are a solid reason to equip your pet with an intelligent collar.
But Personifi’s big sell here is the chatbots.
Chatbot is perhaps not quite the right term. But rather than using a synthesized voice created with an AI like from the service Eleven Labs, all of Shazam’s voice lines will be prerecorded. There are 27 characters to choose from, each with its own personality and each played by a human voice actor. You select one for your pet when you set up the collar, and if you want to change it to one of the other characters later, that will cost $99.
Personifi says each character voice has about 8,000 lines of dialog, with plans to add more as needed. That’s a lot of dialog, sure, but what it means is that Shazam’s pet voices work more like what you’d hear from a video game NPC than a dynamic, evolving chatbot. McHale says vocal synthesization will likely come to the platform eventually, so that the collar can do things like make comments about the score of a football game as you watch it on TV.
The voices are all very Dr. Dolittle; they speak in quippy phrases and crack jokes. Personas range from silly and cutesy to annoying and bewildering. Oddly, all the available characters are identified by illustrations of human avatars on the website. Personas include characters like Bella, which Shazam depicts as a little girl and describes with tags like “cuddler,” “sweet,” and “silly.” Or there is Dr. Gates, a smiling male scientist in a lab coat with the tags “loves kids,” “Nobel prize,” and “pediatric cancer.” You know, classic pet personalities.
McHale says the personas were crafted to offer variety but also align with common personality types people tend to associate with their pets.
“We’ve really surveyed the market,” McHale says. “Almost everybody has an idea as to what the personality is of their pet. It’s uncanny.”
You can further customize these personalities in the app. An array of settings will allow you to change how much of a chatterbox your pet is and dial down the humor settings. The settings also allow you to take your pet to great existential depths. You can select your pet’s values, like compassion, justice, and courage. There are settings for its religious beliefs, power of forgiveness, or thoughts on freedom, fate, and destiny. You can give it a take on politics and broad topics like globalism. It is a truly dizzying amount of customization, yet it’s not really clear how much these settings will change what your pet says when it is begging you to let it go outside and take a dump.
McHale showed me a demo of the Shazam collar over a Zoom call. Roscoe—chocolate lab, rattlesnake bite survivor, and a very good boy indeed—wears the collar while in a room with McHale and a few other people from Personifi. One of Roscoe’s handlers holds out treats and speaks to him, and the collar answers in the voice of voiceover artist Bobby Johnson, aka The RxckStxr.
“Roscoe, how are you feeling?” the handler asks.
“Like I could drink a whole gallon of water,” Roscoe’s collar responds.
“Oh, that’s why you don’t want to go chase squirrels, buddy. You haven’t been getting water all day. Shame on us. I still love you, though, Roscoe.”
Roscoe says, “Let’s go for a walk and you can tell me all about how much you love me.”
It’s fun, but what Roscoe says doesn’t exactly match with what he’s doing. To me, it feels like Roscoe doesn’t care all that much about getting water. Instead, he focused intently on the treats in the room. If he could actually vocalize his thoughts in that moment, he might have instead said something like, “I see you have a treat. Please give me that treat now.”
Some scenarios work better than others. In another example, they play tug-of-war with Roscoe. The collar’s sensors can discern that some play activity is happening, and Roscoe’s zany “voice” says, “You might as well cancel all your plans, because I could do this all day!” It follows up with some grunting and growling noises.
Cat Chat
The collar’s library of canned dialog may be able to approximate the simple, oversize personalities of most dogs. Cats, the other target audience here, are another matter entirely. The conversations you’d need to have to understand your kitten are more complicated.
Daniel “DQ” Quagliozzi is a feline training and behavior specialist who runs Go Cat Go, a cat consultation service in San Francisco. He says people often misunderstand what cats actually want. And a talking collar isn’t likely to help bridge that miscommunication, if the cat is even willing to wear the thing at all.
“Realistically,” Quagliozzi says, “that collar would just be saying ‘get this fucking collar off me’ all the time.”
It’s hard enough to get a straight answer out of your pet, but appending them with a voice box that approximates what experiences a sensor-laden collar thinks they’re going through may not be the most efficient way of figuring them out.
You’ve probably seen the viral Instagram posts where people film their pups pressing buttons that trigger specific phrases. The proposition there is that the animals are learning how to communicate with their owners. In reality, rather than actually understanding what the individual button means, the pets are probably just tapping the ones that produce the biggest reaction (or guaranteed treats) from their owner. Shazam for pets runs into a similar problem. Pets don’t understand much of human language, in the same way we don’t always understand what they’re barking on about.
“The real benefit of the bond is to the human,” McHale says. “This is all about the human being—even the well-being pieces that we’ve built into this. The humans now feel, you know, their pet is safer and better understood.”
The best chatbots, even the ones powered by LLMs, still don’t actually understand what you’re saying. They’re just very good at generating responses that make you feel like they really get you. When you use that mimicry to give voice to another living creature, your pet doesn’t understand what any of it means either. The pet will hear the same voice you do, but it won’t interpret it as its own voice, speaking its own intentions. It will hear it speaking as a separate entity entirely, just closer to its ears than usual.
McHale envisions a world where dogs wearing Shazam collars meet at the dog park. They would sniff and bark at one another, all while a couple of human-voiced chatbots are gabbing on around their necks. Quagliozzi, on the other hand, worries about the darker side of the gimmick of giving pets a voice. He fears it may lead to a rise of social media videos that people think are innocuous but are potentially harmful to their cats.
“That’s one of the things I battle against constantly is people using their cats as props or funny things,” Quagliozzi says. “Scaring their cats or just curating comedy based on how they know a cat will react to something traumatic. Giving them a funny cartoon voice or whatever, I could see that going off the rails.”
The features of the Shazam collar that provide awareness for the owner, particularly the ones that focus on the safety and well-being of that pet, are commendable. Detecting a rattlesnake strike could be a lifesaver. And if it takes a dog tossing out a sassy “Hey pal, it’s kibble time!” to remind their owner to feed them, then so be it. But putting a chatbot on your dog’s collar probably won’t deepen your ties.
The urge to understand your pet is natural. But there are better ways to make sure their needs are met than making them speak your language. The best conversation you’re going to have with your pet is not by getting it to spit sassy wisecracks at you, it’s to meet them at their level.
“We’re just trying to always dial it up, just a little bit,” Quagliozzi says. “The same way we want robots, the same way we want AI companions, all these things. Inherently, human beings are lonely, and we want connection.”