Talking to the animals might be possible

Your dog comes to you every night at 7 p.m., looks searchingly into your eyes, and gives a soft bark.
After years with you, the dog knows the drill: It’s dinner time. I’m hungry! Feed me now!

That’s animal/human communication at its most basic level. But what if the dog could say, “I hurt.”

Would you see the vet earlier?

A startup called Zoolingua is using Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies to help translate dog talk, and much more.

The company wants to enhance understanding of farm animals through language. If chicken sounds could be collected and interpreted, a farmer might know early on if his chickens were distressed. In fact, that’s happened. A machine model has proved capable of detecting emotional changes in birds with accuracy.

In Central Africa, a Silicon Valley company, Conservation Metrics, has collected 900,000 hours of recordings of elephant vocalizations, according to Synced Review. Researchers have been able to pick out all sorts of daily vocalizations, like simple greetings. Such learning may prove helpful in ending poaching or simply preserving habitat for species.

For our own pets, we may well understand patterns of volume, frequency, or tone. We know when they are telling us something and they probably aren’t quoting Shakespeare. Doubters for this kind of research say animal languages just aren’t that deep and human languages might not be the right way to translate them.