Teaching dogs to talk is easier than you think

Melody Jackson is an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dogs are now getting a voice because of her! She developed a technology that helps dogs say things, something she says is vital for therapy dogs, search and rescue, and bomb detection. With her technology, dogs can send texts to a smartphone, and can ‘speak’ aloud to notify others. Jackson has worked with and trained assistance dogs for near twenty years, and combined that with her passion of technology to create her project “FIDO,” or ‘Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations.’ Her team of researchers include a professor, Thad Starner, and a research scientist, Clint Zeagler, and also her eight-year-old dog, Sky. Jackson is also working on medical alert vests, and vests that allow a handler to track the dog wearing the vest. The dog can just pull a tab on its vest, and the handler can be alerted.

I chose this article because I was amazed at the technology and how it was used. I was also impressed and awed by the way dogs could understand the technology so quickly -- the longest any of Jackson’s dogs took to understand the vest and its capabilities was twenty-eight minutes, and the shortest time was twenty-seven seconds! I was astounded at the way it was used to find missing people, find bombs, distinguish one thing from another, and even alert 911 if the dog’s owner is in trouble. I was also a bit confused about when the dogs pulled the tab, how the technology understood the dog wanted to say ‘ball’ and not ‘frisbee.’

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