Motivation

Humanity has wanted to talk to animals since the dawn of time, and repeated scientific investigations, since at least the 1900s, have revealed the challenges associated with this line of investigation. Promising results, while often winning popular enthusiasm, have been impossible to directly replicate and been critiqued as being the result of over-interpretation or unintentional cueing.

In 2024, scientific papers in PLOS One and Scientific Reports provided the first published evidence that dogs can discern the word sounds produced by sound buttons, and that dogs are not pressing the buttons simply “at random”. Anecdotal evidence, including this database of early reports, suggests that far more may be going on. On the right, the video of Cookie’s conversation with her human Lana, would seem to indicate that dogs can understand the concepts of different days, are able to hold their humans to a promise, and can engage in a back-and-forth in order to get additional information.

Beginning in 2019, there was an explosion of interest in “talking” animals: dogs and cats using buttons that produce pre-programmed word sounds when pressed. Hundreds of thousands of households have begun teaching dogs and cats to use these sound buttons, and their efforts have earned feature articles in the New York Times, The Economist, as well as over a billion views on social media.