About PetConnect
Read about current technology, and how PetConnect advances on it.
Present Technology
Artificial Intelligence is a very powerful and versatile tool, when it comes to humans; the animal side of A.I. is lacking in many, many ways. We may have a rudimentary level of understanding of cats and dogs, yet there is still much to explore. For example, while we have made a decent start on understanding animal sounds, animal emotions and behavior are still shrouded in mystery. On this note, any pet "translators" on the internet explicitly state that they are not to be taken seriously and are purely for entertainment. But with A.I. growing more and more each year, there is not a better time than now to take hold of the course of A.I. and steer it more towards cats and dogs, too.
Our Technology
In the future, we envision to have Artificial Intelligence deeply entwined with pet translation and communication, allowing for a robust knowledge of cat and dog sounds, body language, and emotions. For a strong and capable A.I., we will use Deep Learning so our A.I. can adapt and be constantly learning, with the more data it is fed, the more accurate it gets. It would recognize sounds and behaviors and respond accordingly. Each sound or behavior is attached to a different variable, and the A.I. would output those variables as translations. For even more accuracy, users of PetConnect will be asked to fill out a form for each pet, with questions that help tailor the A.I.'s response. Disabled pets' translations would have a higher chance of meaning "I need help!" When translating, the A.I. will give you all the possible translations, by giving you a percentage of how likely they are to be correct. For visual detection the A.I would scan the recording of the pet and would detect recognizable patterns and would assign those to variables, too. Finally, for sound detection, the A.I would compare the sounds it heard to cat or dog sounds it knew, and would assign a variable from there. Of course, the variables are subject to change depending on the A.I.'s experience with that pet and the form results, for an adaptive, accurate, and personalized experience for each pet.
Breakthroughs Necessary to Create PetConnect
Currently, breakthroughs in three main fields of Artificial Intelligence need to happen to make PetConnect a reality. Visual, emotional, and audio A.I. are notable areas in their field, but still need much more expanding on. Visual A.I. revolves around seeing what something looks like, but then categorizes what it sees, too. This works well for human emotions and expressions, but needs a lot of work on the animal side of things, such as identifying the body language of pets, and then translating that into a mood. Emotional A.I. uses facial recognition to decode the emotion you are feeling. This technology works very well on humans, but needs a lot of work on animals. Finally, audio A.I. is a type of A.I. that processes verbal human language and outputs a response according to that. This type of A.I. follows the pattern of the others and needs a lot of improvement for animals. We also need breakthroughs in pet translation, since we don't understand pet behavior as deeply as necessary for PetConnect to function. Another issue is that more of this research and knowledge is about dogs, and we need to work more on understanding cats. Next, we devised a way to test the functionality of PetConnect. First, we would take two virtually identical pets in all categories and place them in two virtually identical households. Second, we would give one household PetConnect, and one we would not. Third, we would wait until we got results, hopefully ones that follow our hypothesis, which was that the household with PetConnect would bond with the pet more than the other household.