Pet Translation

Pet translation — turning barks, meows, and pet vocalizations into human-language phrases — is older than most people realize. Takara's BowLingual shipped in 2002. Twenty-four years and a dozen products later, no device has ever delivered what the marketing language suggests. PettiChat is the latest entrant; whether the LLM era is genuinely different is the question we're tracking.

This pillar covers the science of animal communication, the engineering of the classification + LLM-generation pipelines behind modern products, and the working history of why every previous attempt has fallen short. We talk to ethologists, read the papers, and stay honest about the gap between classifying emotional state — which is real and useful — and translating sentences, which is mostly comforting fiction. If you want the unhyped read on what AI can and can't decode, start here.