– Researchers at the University of Michigan are studying how artificial intelligence technology can be used to understand a dog’s communication.
“By using speech processing models initially trained on human speech, our research opens a new window into how we can leverage what we built so far in speech processing to start understanding the nuances of dog barks,” said Rada Mihalcea, director of U-M’s AI laboratory.The study found that AI models originally trained on human speech can be used as a starting point to train new systems that target animal communication.
Scientists were able to repurpose a human speech analysis model that enabled them to tap into robust voice-enabled technologies that recognize spoken words and speakers.“These models are able to learn and encode the incredibly complex patterns of human language and speech,” Abzaliev notes. “We wanted to see if we could leverage this ability to discern and interpret dog barks.”