Click Clack Bark: Dogs Who Type

by Brian Dunning
October 8, 2024

If you're a dog owner, you may have seen these soundboard products — buttons that your dog can push to speak words and communicate with you. You may have even seen videos on social media where a dog communicated an abstract concept, apparently understanding the idea of language. But is this really language, or is the dog simply making associations between the button and a reward: a treat or a walk or going outside. Or is it even less than that, the dog responding to cues from the owner and stepping on buttons while approaching their owner who is standing next to those buttons? Today we're going to evaluate the evidence — and thus the validity of these products — for dogs being able to usefully communicate.

Most research into this question — which has been going on for nearly 100 years — has been done using devices called AICs, for Augmentative Interspecies Communication. Typically these consist of several buttons that you place on the floor, big enough to be easily pressed with a paw, often in different bright colors and/or with some visual icon printed on them. Pressing the button plays an audible sound, which is usually a recording of you (the dog's owner) saying a familiar word like "food" or "outside" or "walk". These devices are commonly called soundboards. Some may have just a few buttons; others may have several dozen.

A variation on these has an unfortunately similar name: ACIs, for Animal Computer Interfaces. The difference between an AIC soundboard and an ACI is that the soundboard just plays a sound and requires a human to respond to the dog's request. An ACI, on the other hand, automatically performs a function, such as dispensing food or opening a door, without any human interaction. ACIs are sometimes used in zoos or other animal captivity situations; they're frequently used in animal communication research in many species, not just dogs.

So we turn to the research being done in the field today. Are dogs able to communicate to their owners what they want, via associative learning with these soundboard devices? As always, when I look at a research paper, I look at the authors' conflict of interest statement. Here's one example from a 2024 paper published in PLoS One that found positive results for dogs using a commercially available soundboard. From the discussion of their results:

...Our findings provide the first evidence of button word comprehension by owner-trained soundboard-using dogs, and demonstrate that dogs' contextually appropriate responses to button presses were comparable regardless of the identity of the person using the soundboard, and the absence of other environmental cues related to that word. Our findings also suggest that dogs attend to the sounds recorded onto their buttons, given that they responded equivalently to words when they were produced by button presses and when they were spoken by their owners.

To be clear, the conflict of interest statement disclosed that six of the authors had previously consulted for the manufacturer of that soundboard, and two more of the authors were current employees of that manufacturer. Normally this would make the article a hard pass for me and I'd strike it from my sources, but I mention here because its results were consistent with other papers I found.

I did look quite carefully at another paper which is probably the most-cited in the field these days, and it has a similar problem. Four of the five authors disclose that they were directly paid by another of these product manufacturers to perform this study. It was published in 2023 in WIREs Cognitive Science and it's a survey of lots of studies, though it focuses on the ACI computer devices among all animal species, not just dogs on soundboards. The reason I point this out is that, despite the conflict of interest, the paper's findings are generally negative. The authors point to the history of research in this field and note that over the past 50 years, funding and interest have both almost completely dried up due to the lack of positive results. It points to specific cases like Koko, the gorilla who allegedly learned sign language, but it was found that this illusion was nearly always the dubious real-time interpretation provided by her handler (there's a complete Skeptoid episode on Koko and other other signing apes, #630, if you want to know more).

The paper finds the decline of the field to be due to three areas of controversy:

1. Use of these ACI devices don't require that the animal has learned language, or indeed any form of communication. Pushing a button and having food come out is simply learned behavior, more formally called associative learning. Pavlov's Dog didn't salivate because it understood language, but because it had learned to associate the sound of the bell with food. So this isn't really the "interspecies communication" the researchers are hoping for.
   
   
2. The systems are often found to be ecologically irrelevant. Meaning, researchers have observed animal behavior in the wild that can be described as communication, and a button to push is not a valid proxy for that. So as far as researching animal communication goes, an ACI experiment is kind of upside down and backwards.
   
   
3. These studies are all too often rendered invalid by researchers cueing the animals, either consciously or unconsciously, and a lack of systematic approaches for recording data in such an abstract field. It's very hard to do an animal language study that meets high methodological standards.

But at the very end, the paper makes what I think is a very salient comment. It mentions that we're in a "renaissance in the field of AIC device-facilitated interspecies communication." To me this is a very careful and qualified statement; as if they wish to meet the goals of the consumer product manufacturer who paid for the study, but also don't want to make any unscientific declarations. The fact is that products like these dog soundboards are inexpensive and widely available today, which wasn't the case 25-50 years ago. Any renaissance is probably due simply to the fact that now we can all have these things if we want them.

Is there any science that remains to be done? Well, at least as far as these dog soundboards go, there may not be. The decline of research over the past 50 years has shown us that true language skills are not necessary for simple associative learning devices like these soundboards to be useful. Dogs easily associate the word "walk" with going for a walk; and most can also associate the button that pronounces "walk" with going for a walk. Dogs do associate devices like these soundboards with a few basic functions that are most important for us, as dog owners, to know — they're hungry, they need to go outside to pee, they want to go for a walk. The pitfall lies in assuming this means the dog has learned language or might be able to expand their communication skills if given a soundboard with more abstract concepts, let alone an alphabetic keyboard.

Yet this is where all the attention is being focused these days: the idea that a dog with a soundboard can construct sentences of several words and communicate abstract concepts that require a comprehension of language. Google this today and you'll get promotional articles for a lab at UC San Diego, working in partnership with one of the manufacturers of these soundboards. Anecdotes run strong through this study and its over 10,000 participants worldwide: people who believe their dogs are constructing abstract sentences by pushing word buttons meaning things like "Hey mom, my paw hurts, can you look at it please?" or "Let's go for a walk so I can see my friend." The question this leaves us with is whether these soundboards have truly given dogs the tools they need to construct grammar to communicate abstractly, or whether hopeful dog owners are simply combining confirmation bias and apophenia to perceive complex sentences in data that is actually just random.

There are a lot of videos on social media with optimistic titles like "The Dog Who Can Talk" and so forth. I watched many of them, and few are very impressive once you realize that the owner is cueing the dog in almost all cases. Something I saw a lot of was the owner doing this while standing at the soundboard, and the dog was looking up at the owner and just stepping on buttons without even paying attention — their attention being focused on the owner. There are also videos where the soundboards are being used as intended: the owner videos it from across the room without cuing, and the dog goes over, looks at the buttons, and pushes one. Cases like these represent deliberate use of associative learning by the dog. I never saw an uncued video where the dog, when left alone, employed multiple buttons in what some of these owners described as "sentences".

The San Diego lab, run by principal investigator Federico Rossano, only just this year published its first academic paper. It was extraordinarily unimpressive, a fact Rossano acknowledged, calling it a "necessary first step." The finding was that dogs do respond to soundboard cues the same as they respond to verbal cues from their owner. There's no surprise that dogs respond to verbal cues; you can say "Walk" and your dog will practically jump out of its skin in excitement over the prospect of a walk. All this study found is that the dog will respond the same way whether that command is spoken or is triggered by someone pushing the button on a soundboard, and regardless of whether it's the owner or a random research assistant pushing the button. Dogs respond to cues. Nothing earthshaking there. Anything beyond that which you may read about the San Diego study is so far unproven.

So here's the bottom line. We have solid evidence, plus thousands of years of anecdotal personal experience, that dogs understand basic commands and will respond to them. Many dogs, but not all, can learn to associate a limited number of buttons on commercially available soundboards with basic actions: food, outside, walk, potty, and possibly a few others. These soundboards do appear to be effective tools for many dogs to be able to make requests of their owners, but these communications should not be expected to exceed the normal body language and behavioral requests that dogs already make. The idea that dogs can make more complex or abstract requests using these soundboards is not supported by evidence, despite lots of cherrypicked videos appearing to support this on social media channels.

So if you want to try one of these devices, you can reasonably expect your dog to be able to learn to make the same requests he already makes of you now, perhaps with a bit less ambiguity. And that's a good thing. But if your expectations exceed that, you're likely to be disappointed. And who wants to be disappointed with their best friend?

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning