The universe of applications keeps expanding: you can find applications for almost anything. An example of this is the Meowtalk application, designed to translate your cat’s meows and help you understand what each meow means. The app promises to help cat pet owners understand the different sounds they make and has become a hit.
Meowtalk: Help to understand your cat
The Meowtalk application has a very innovative proposal: it looks for the translation of the sounds your cat makes into human language. In this way, feline owners will be able to understand what their pets mean every time they meow.
You can download the app for free on your cell phone, as it is available for iOS and Android.
The application says that each cat has its own vocabulary that is used to communicate with its owners. This implies that a cat may have a meow of its own to indicate that it is hungry or wants to go out.
Thus, the developers of the app built on this to create a simple interface that uses machine learning to recognize the meows of each cat individually. The application has a button to record your cat’s sounds and interpret them into eleven general intentions.
Some of these intentions are: happy, defense, angry, attack, call to mother and call for attention. Something interesting that the application proposes is that you can create several profiles that will allow you to have a record in case there is more than one cat at home.
The story behind the application
Meowtalk’s developer is engineer Javier Sanchez. After working at Amazon and collaborating in the development of Alexa, he launched this app designed to help people bond with their cats more closely.
To understand a little of the technical side of this application, it can be said that it is based on a learning model capable of associating the collected recording with a predetermined response. It is a model with a semantic field that can grow over time. The general learning model is developed by Google and interprets each sound, associating it with preset intentions.
On the other hand, the application has a machine learning feature. This makes her capable of learning new words that can be associated with the meows. It should be remembered that this app is in an early stage of development.
It was launched in 2020, but it is in Japan where it is most popular. In that country it has seventeen million downloads. Also, there are about 250 million recorded meows of Japanese cats.
The reality is that communication between humans and cats is not always easy and for many cat owners, understanding meowing can be a mystery to solve. In fact, experts say that the vocal variety of cats is superior to the barking of dogs, but the difference is that cats don’t usually care much about showing you that they understand you.
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